"Scenes of Subjection" from the Household of Johns Hopkins
Dr. Monica Blair Carefully Retells the Life of James Jones
How does one recuperate lives entangled with and impossible to differentiate from the terrible utterances that condemned them to death, the account books that identified them as units of value, the invoices that claimed them as property, and the banal chronicles that stripped them of human features? — Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”
In her now classic article, “Venus in Two Acts,” Dr. Saidiya Hartman sets out the dilemmas that slavery researchers confront, especially those of us who place enslaved people at the center of our inquiries. One we can term methodological: What can we say when left with an archival record that is shard-like, fractured, and constructed with the interests of enslavers in mind. The other is ethical: When we confront the subjection of enslaved people in the archive, don’t we risk extending, continuing, and repeating that same subjection when we construct narratives that conjecture, invent, and even substitute our own assumptions for those of enslaved people, for those of people whose subjectivity we cannot easily know?
Dr. Hartman’s caution is one we at Hard Histories keep in mind as we approach the fragmentary record of the men enslaved in the household of Johns Hopkins. U.S. census returns are their own evidence of subjection: Men which these records stripped of their names, their families, and their communities. These were men whose very names were discarded by census takers who substituted for them the name of an “owner,” Johns Hopkins.
Among those leading this research and the related ethical reflection is Dr. Monica Kristin Blair, historian and education coordinator at Hopkins Retrospective. We have been following Dr. Blair’s work as she navigates the thorny terrain identified by Dr. Hartman. Those of you who tuned-in to our September 2023 conference, “Baltimore’s Hard Histories,” had a preview when Dr. Blair introduced her research into the life of James Jones. She explained that, while evidence strongly suggests that Mr. Jones was in his early life enslaved by Mr. Hopkins, understanding Mr. Jones’s life has demanded painstaking research here.
New this month is a report from Dr. Blair which illustrates how she balances method and ethics. This new section on the Hopkins Retrospective “Reexamining Hopkins History” page, explains what Dr. Blair can and cannot know about the enslavement and manumission of James Jones here. You can follow more of Dr. Blair’s work by subscribing to the Hopkins Retrospective newsletter here. We hear that the next issue is just around the corner.
We’ll leave you today with a final reflection from Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts”: “The conjunction of hope and defeat define this labor and leave open its outcome. The task of writing the impossible, (not the fanciful or the utopian but “histories rendered unreal and fantastic”), has as its prerequisites the embrace of likely failure and the readiness to accept the ongoing, unfinished and provisional character of this effort, particularly when the arrangements of power occlude the very object that we desire to rescue.”
Thank you to Dr. Blair for sharing her on-going work and for illuminating the dilemmas that Dr. Hartman so candidly warned us about.
— MSJ
It is extremely heartening to read that at the forefront of Hard Histories is the stated intention to retell the lives of those whose identities were initially stripped away along with their humanity is to be pursued with care and dignity. The ancestors are watching.