LITMIR.BIZ

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shall have, if taken up in this County, Forty Shillings Reward, beside what the Law allows; and if at any greater Distance, or out of the Colony, a proportionable Recompence paid them, by

      GEORGE WASHINGTON.

      N.B. If they should be taken separately, the Reward will be proportioned.⁴

      Washington’s notice typifies the variety of document a slave owner might be expected to compose upon the event of a slave escape. His prose follows the conventions of anglophone fugitive advertising from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, conventions that I discuss at greater length in the next chapter. In brief, Washington’s ad describes the age, dress, embodiment, and likely provenance of four people who will be hunted on the strength of those details. It also offers a sizable reward.

      Additionally, and crucial for the argument of this book, Washington’s ad follows the generic conventions of a subset of fugitive ads that attend meticulously to the language practices of the people who are described.⁵ As a case in point, Washington includes pointed assessments of each one of his quarries’ linguistic features. In the absence of the shorthand visual judgments that photographic technology makes possible, linguistic features are of obvious significance in the identification of an unknown person during the eighteenth century, especially insofar as linguistic features overlap with and buttress related perceptions about age, dress, embodiment, and provenance. Indeed, this unsystematic rendering of perceived linguistic features is a perfect example of what I mean by the term “metalinguistic writing,” and so I am particularly interested in advertisements that include these details. This ad’s premises are clear: one must listen in on elements of language that disclose other people’s identities; these clues are revealed in speech’s varied contours; and, furthermore, linguistic particularities combined with other signs of difference can be used to gloss a person’s public character. In order to locate escaped slaves who are present in Washington’s own account books only as made-up names and purchase prices, the ad above endows these four men with bodies and accompanying sounds. Even as those bodies and sounds are merely figments of text, they are meant to be recognizable to readers as sortable linguistic types.⁶

      That the duly respected general and first president of the United States owned, managed, and pursued slaves in a way that is conventional and tedious (rather than atypical or benevolent) should come as no surprise. After all, the gap between enlightenment humanism’s vaunted rhetoric and slavery’s barbarities is one of eighteenth-century culture’s most basic cultural conditions (rather than contradictions).⁷ In Washington’s case, the logistics of his long history as a slave owner are all at once mundane and shocking.⁸ The people Washington held in bondage powered a lucrative system of farms that grew over the course of the proprietor’s lifetime from two thousand to eight thousand acres. A total of 317 slaves were enumerated in a census undertaken simultaneous to the writing of Washington’s last will and testament in 1799.⁹ The contemporary visitor to Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation museum might hear from a tour guide or read on a placard that Washington manumitted all his slaves upon his death. These historical approximations encourage the misconstruction that Washington himself purposefully manumitted 317 individuals in 1799. In fact, the details are more complex, the dates later, and the numbers less comprehensive.¹⁰

      Returning to the escape of Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid in 1761, the editors of the Papers of George Washington report that two of the four men who appear in the advertisement—Peros (a.k.a. Parros) and Jack—had come to Washington’s plantation as dower slaves via his wealthier bride.¹¹ The other two—Neptune and Cupid—appear only in Washington’s account books after 1760, a fact that lends credence to the ad’s claim that these men “were bought from an African Ship in August 1759.”¹² The editors further note that three of the four men—Peros, Jack, and Cupid—are included on a list of slaves at Mount Vernon that was composed in 1762, a year after the initial escape.¹³ Regarding the slave referred to as Neptune, the situation is foggier. He does not appear on the 1762 list referenced above. However, in May 1765, Washington’s account books include a debit to one of his overseers for 3l. 7s. 3p. for “pd Prison Fees in Maryld Neptune.”¹⁴ It is unlikely that the Neptune who was bailed out of a Maryland prison and returned to Washington’s human holdings in 1765 is the same man as the Neptune who escaped in 1761. The details of how the other three escapees—Peros, Jack, and Cupid—were returned to bondage under Washington such that they were enumerated in the next year’s census are also obscured.

      There are two main reasons why I have traced the broad outlines of this escape and its aftermath here. First, I want to use a common genre of eighteenth-century writing, fugitive advertising, in order to show that linguistic difference was a salient aspect of interpersonal interaction in the eighteenth-century anglophone world. Linguistic difference was also a salient aspect of the representation of such interactions after the fact. People sorted and identified one another with attention to linguistic particularities. Then, as now, “Everything is summoned by an intonation,” as Derrida writes.¹⁵ Or, in the words of the contemporary poet Elizabeth Alexander, “We encounter each other in words, words / spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed / words to consider, reconsider.”¹⁶ The second point I want to make by way of Washington’s advertisement is that linguistic difference was and remains narratively generative. Fugitive ads show this plainly. Across many forms and genres of writing in the period, narrative strategies were developed in order to represent the complexities of interpersonal interaction in a realm of anglophone heterogeneity. Rhetorical strategies for naming social relationships made visible through linguistic difference flourished, as this book’s chapters show. As writers developed descriptive techniques for encoding in text whether another person spoke well or badly, rapidly or slowly, with what quirks and disabilities, and in what kind of accent, the characterological and narrative landscape of eighteenth-century anglophone writing widened dramatically.

      Consider, for example, the way that Washington’s ad can be read against the grain as four miniscule and partial biographies. Their bodies, clothes, origins, and linguistic particularities appear as the fleeting details of subjectivity—paltry details, certainly, but details nonetheless. For my purposes, I want to stress here that the linguistic particularities Washington ascribes to Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid reveal several dimensions of anglophony’s eighteenth-century texture, especially as they relate to embodiment. As a case in point, Washington’s ad claims that Neptune and Cupid, who are new to North America, “talk very broken and unintelligible English.” Put another way, they are multilingual subjects and their English has been acquired recently, informally, and under the duress of trying to adapt to enslavement. They “talk” English, but unintelligibly, which, aside from being a contradiction, is a judgment on these men’s social and even civilizational statuses relative to Washington. By contrast, Jack “speaks pretty good English, having been several Years in the Country.” His body is “well made” and marked with the residues of severed familial and community allegiances by “Cuts down each Cheek, being his Country Marks.” With “pretty good English” and a marked face that attests to other cultural loyalties, Jack appears in the Maryland Gazette as a quintessential multilingual anglophone subject of the eighteenth century.

      A tantalizing and subtle detail of the ad links Jack, Neptune, and Cupid together as a conspiratorial group. The three are “countrymen,” a nebulous indication by Washington that perhaps these men communicated in versions of the same African language or in African languages that were mutually intelligible or pidginized to the degree that each could make himself understood to the others.¹⁷ Read in this way, it is possible to surmise that Washington heard the African languages of these and other slaves with some regularity, or at least that his overseers did. This idea is further supported by the fact that, as Donald Sweig notes, Washington was regularly purchasing slaves “from the mid-1750s until about 1770.”¹⁸ It is also likely that Washington is openly suggesting to the reader that a shared set of African linguistic protocol helped facilitate the men’s planning and eventual escape. Be on guard against slaves speaking to each other in languages you do not understand, Washington’s ad warns the reader. Be on guard against the multilingualism of certain others. Through these short descriptions, it is clear that Washington’s ad pitches linguistic difference

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