What can a photograph of a girl posed on a horsehair sofa tell us about black life at the turn of the century, or about the lives of young black women rushing to the city, desperate to enter a new era? How might it anticipate the obstacles awaiting them? How might this photograph illuminate the entanglement of slavery and freedom and offer a glimpse of the futures that will unfold?
Looking at her immobilized on the old horsehair sofa, pinioned like a rare specimen against the scrolling pattern, her small arms tucked tight against her torso like clipped wings, I think about the kinds of touch that cannot be refused. In 1883, the age of consent was ten. There was no statutory-rape law to penalize what might have occurred in the studio, and, had such a law existed, a poor black girl would have fallen outside its reach. When a rape or assault was reported to the police or to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the girl, seduced or raped, might be sentenced to the training school or reformatory, to protect her or to punish her for being too fast, too mature, or too knowing.
Innocence—that is, virginity—was the issue, not at what age a girl was old enough for the taking. Previous immorality meant a man could do whatever he wanted, and negated a girl’s claims to protection by the law. Colored girls were always presumed to be immoral. (One of the arguments against the statutory-rape legislation passed at the end of the nineteenth century, raising the age of consent in most states to sixteen or eighteen, was that lascivious Negro girls would use the law to blackmail white men. Black girls came before the law, but were not protected by it.)
As the photograph makes plain, her body was already marked by a history of sexual defilement. Under the prevailing set of social arrangements, she was formally free; in reality, she was vulnerable to the triple jeopardy of economic, racial, and sexual violence. This necessary and routine violence defined the afterlife of slavery and documented the reach of the plantation into the ghetto.
Looking at the photograph, one can discern the symphony of anger residing in the arrested figure. It is an image that I can neither claim nor refuse. Admittedly, it is a hard place to begin: the avowal that violence is not an exception but, rather, that it defines the horizon of her existence. It is to acknowledge that we were never meant to survive, and yet we are still here. The entanglement of violence and sexuality, of care and exploitation, continues to define the meaning of being black and female.