I went to that black barbershop for the reason millions like me have done so before—to feel at home. But for years, as Quincy Mills’s fascinating Cutting Across the Color Line reveals, black barbershops in America were unavailable to people of my lineage and color. Though they became a stereotypical image of a black social institution, crystallized best in Barbershop, they began as institutions of segregation and white supremacy. In the antebellum era, but also well into the period of Reconstruction, black barbershops—predominantly in the South but often in the North—only served white men. Prohibiting black men from cutting black hair for a profit allowed slave owners to control their slaves’ relationship to their own and to other black bodies. At the same time, slave owners profited from their enslaved barbers by hiring their slaves out to cut the hair of white townspeople. If the barber was lucky, his owner allowed him to take a percentage of the profits, which he sometimes used to purchase his freedom.
Their distance from harsh, manual labor made these positions relatively privileged ones, leading Mills to argue that barbers initially occupied an unstable class position. “As captive capitalists in a slave society,” Mills writes, free barbers represented “both the possibilities and limits of freedom for African Americans in the antebellum period.” Cutting hair granted a barber control of his time, a rarity for black people, and, if he owned his own shop, the resources to enter the black middle class.
Barbering created an unstable relationship between black men and white men. As barbers, black men gained the opportunity to befriend white patrons, who might help them avoid illegal enslavement. White customers also felt a license to speak freely in barbershops—as if the black barbers were not there—making barbers into information hubs essential to abolitionists and fugitive slaves. (In Boston, Peter Howard’s barbershop, which both white abolitionists and black men patronized, was a stop on the Underground Railroad.) Yet barbers still faced a punitive system that supported white violence against black people, and were susceptible to capture and illegal re-enslavement. If they provided anything less than total deference, they faced economic and violent consequences, and possibly re-enslavement.
Because his status depended upon his deference, the black barber could be seen as a trickster. The classic example of this is the barber Babo in Melville’s Benito Cereno. “Babo plays the role of loyal servant,” Mills writes, “to evoke the common perception of the paternal master-slave relationship.” Under this disguise, Babo leads a slave rebellion and mutiny, symbolizing historical black barbers who submitted to their masters in order to exercise greater freedom and, in some cases, advance black rights.