Painting attributed to Jacques Guillame Lucein Amans, “Bélizaire and the Frey Children,” c. 1837, Oil on canvas, 54.5 x 43.5 inches, Private Collection. Source: orgdenmuseum.org
During that process, a shadowy figure emerged behind the three showily dressed white children, their fifteen-year-old enslaved person, a boy who had been painted out by someone perhaps offended by the presentation of this young man, dressed as fashionably as the white children who of course may have been his half-siblings. Once the figure was restored, the painting went to the Metropolitan Museum in New York where it will hang in the fall in the American Wing. A curator opined that it goes some distance toward correcting the museum’s imbalance.
Well, maybe a few inches. But the distance that an historic house outside of Louisville, Kentucky, has gone can be measured in miles. Known as Locust Grove or the George Rogers Clark House because that “Conqueror of the Great North West” as a sign, surely to be removed, deems him, he spent his last years crippled and mute as a guest here and at one time was buried in the family graveyard till a neighbor who didn’t want graves in her garden had them all removed to a cemetery. I didn’t know that Clark’s grave was empty when I first visited the house and wrote of its inmate, “How he fell in the fire and burned his leg half off…”
This is the first house I’ve visited that has reconstructed its long since torn down slave cabins—or cabins for enslaved people as the sophisticated guide explained. The term seeks to indicate that they were enslaved against their will, again a first in my experience. And frankness about the working population of this once 700-acre farm has influenced the guide’s other descriptions. She explained that urine emptied every morning from the bedroom chamber pots was invaluable as bleach and as setting cloth dyes. She even went into detail about the portable bidet in the owners’ bedroom—“to wash the stinky away”—explaining that visiting children were always fascinated.
Now that the odor of sanctity that used to enshrine historic houses has also been partly washed away, I’m hoping an enterprising historian will do more research into the making of the enslaved people’s clothes. Catherine Clinton in her remarkable The Plantation Mistress quotes many letters from these mistresses about the labor of making these clothes. (One of her chapters is called “Slaves of Slaves”.) On a plantation with several hundred workers, this annual labor, involving spinning flax, weaving and dyeing cloth, measuring, cutting and sewing by hand would seem to indicate a certain degree of intimacy between this white woman and her black servitors (inevitably in these letters called servants, not slaves). Did she also make their underwear? I learned when imagining how Margaret Erskine, the heroine of my next book, Taken by the Shawnee, measured clothes she was making for the warriors how a relationship developed due to this inescapable intimacy. Was this also true on the plantations?
Since one of the claims being made for the portrait of the Frey family is that the similar costuming of the four children indicates a certain intimacy, we need to know more about how these clothes were made: by whom, using what materials and what patterns.
There may have been something of a tradition, long forgotten, behind including an enslaved person in a family portrait of white owners. A friend showed me a photo of a similar painting of his pre-Civil War family with a black man standing at the edge of the group. In this painting he wears a long white coat and trousers, not the brilliant colored clothes of his owners. And he is barefoot.
We won’t know much about the possible feelings of guilt that may have tormented white owners but since they were human beings, it seems they could not have entirely escaped. Perhaps posing an enslaved person as though he is part of the family served to endorse that familiar myth, even if he is barefoot.
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