" the line between them was not immutable"

Last week, the students watched the 1940 version of the motion picture Little Old New York, which is set in 1807 New York. The film depicts the efforts of a man to build a steamboat. Throughout the movie, we see the ways in which class and race help define urban life as it had long defined the experiences of people who lived on the countryside. 

I asked the students to compare the experiences of the characters in this film to the experiences of four enslaved women featured in Dolen Perkins-Valdez's novel, Wench. The book uncovers a little-known aspect of southern life, namely the ways in which white southern men traveled to resorts in free territory – in this case – Ohio, taking their enslaved “mistresses” rather than their wives with them. I thought the scene in which four enslaved women were permitted to leave the resort (where they resided seasonally with their masters) and travel to Dayton, Ohio, might be a useful way to think about how different bodies inhabit the city space before the Civil War. Two students did an excellent job of not only thinking this through, but making connections between the movie and Perkins-Valdez’ novel. 

A.J. wrote, “The black women were more respected in Dayton than at the rural resort [where other whites, many of them southerners, were]. They were allowed to go into stores...The women were even trusted with money to buy things. In comparison, the black [tavern worker] in Little Old New York wasn’t trusted very much even though he was left to watch over the tavern while the owner and the other whites [who patronized it] were gone. There were bad stereotypes of blacks in this movie. Blacks were portrayed as being thieves and drunkards to be specific.”

Lauren wrote, “In the movie Little Old New York, the bar maiden Pat O’Day is a well-seasoned city woman. She is ambitious independent. Pat uses the market to buy and sell ale for profit. The women from Wench, however, were only just finding their independence. As slave women, they weren’t accustomed to the freedom regularly given in the city. For example, Mawu asked the others, “You think they gone let us go into a store and buy something without no note from our master.” Lauren noted that there are other ways to look at the differences between the characters in the book and film. We can look at social rank. Drawing on Gunther Barth’s City People, another text in the class, she wrote, “Barth states that although at times a clash between the have and the have-nots seems imminent, the line between them was not immutable. Lauren pointed out the moment when Lizzie desired to get her master-lover to free a male slave who wants to marry a free African American woman who is the daughter of a barber. Lauren was able to see how Lizzie and this woman formed a connection as individuals who were black and female even though they were very different from one another. Lizzie does not yet know the ways of the city like the barber’s daughter nor is she free like this woman. They do have the capacity to love someone else.

In this blog's next entry, I will share the outcomes of an exercise the students wrote during our visit two days ago to the “city” home of antebellum Alabama businessman and Senator Robert Jemison, his wife, Priscilla Cherokee and their daughter Cherokee.