At some point about two years ago, it became my mission to try to complete the tale of Brown’s incredible life and art, and to figure out who the “real” Henry Box Brown was—the man behind the mask, the man who might exist apart from the many roles he would perform. I had already uncovered key details about Brown’s life. For example, my sources indicated that Brown learned conjure (African magic) from another enslaved man while he was still in slavery and wove it into all of the spectacles he created. Sources I uncovered also indicate that he was literate, writing and performing heroic roles in his own dramas while in England, and that he continued to perform as a mesmerist, musician, and lecturer during the last decade of his life, before he died and was buried at Toronto’s famous Necropolis Cemetery in 1897.
After extensive research, I have come to the conclusion that Brown manipulated alter-egos throughout his life, including (but not limited to) such sobriquets as “The King of All Mesmerists,” “The African Chief,” and “Dr. Henry Brown, Professor of Electro-Biology.” He created a trickster-like presence and an ever-changing, innovative performance art that melded theater, street shows, magic, painting, singing, print culture, visual imagery, acting, mesmerism, and even medical treatments. Brown’s multi-media art attempted to move beyond the flat and stereotypical representation of African Americans present in the phenomenally popular transatlantic performance mode of the nineteenth-century minstrel show. Ever the escape artist, Brown sought to evade nineteenth-century culture’s prescriptions for appropriate African American behavior, as well as for the representation of Blacks within art. But was he successful? And could I ever uncover the “real” Henry Box Brown?
Act One: A Man and His Box
“I entered the world a slave. . . . Yes, they robbed me of myself before I could know the nature of their wicked arts,” comments Brown in the opening words of his second autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (1851). In these lines, Brown configures enslavement as a type of negative sorcery (it is his owners, not Brown, who practice “wicked arts”). He is “branded . . . with the mark of bondage” and will only escape by rebranding himself as something more than “stolen property,” as something magical and perhaps even more than human.