Page 55 - Purchasing Power Black Kids and American Consumer Culture

40 . The Shadow of Whiteness

Slaves who aspired to fashion were derided for also aspiring to some-
thing they could not, by definition, attain: whiteness. 6 After having
learned the shoemaking trade, James L. Smith was put in charge of a
shoemaking shop that his master visited once a week to collect the earn-
ings. When the shop earned a great deal, Mr. Smith would "keep some
back for myself, as I had worked for it" (Smith, Mars, Grimes, Offley,
and Smith 1971, 163). Eventually, having saved fifteen dollars in this
manner, Smith (also known as "Brother Payne") bought a piece of cloth
and had a fine suit made—to be worn with the watch, chain, and seal he
already owned. "I was very proud and loved to dress well," he says, and
goes on to recount with relish his reception when he first wore the suit:
"It was Brother Payne here, and Brother Payne there; in fact, I was nearly
everywhere." The admiration and excitement he received from his peers
was not shared by his master's circle:

[T]he first Sunday that I was arrayed in my new suit, I was passing the
court house bounds, when I saw my master and a man named Betts
standing near by. Betts caught sight of me; says he: "Lindsey, come
here." Not knowing what he wanted I went to him; whereupon he
commenced looking first at me, then at my master; then at my master,
then at me; finally he said: "Who is master; Lindsey or you, for he
dresses better than you do? Does he own you, or do you own him?"
(163-64)

The theatricality of Betts's reaction to Brother Payne's fine suit is un-
mistakable, and his response chastises both Payne for dressing above his
station, and his master for not having a firmer hand in Payne's wardrobe—
slaves ought to dress like slaves. The play on race is hard to miss since
this performance of racial misrecognition hinges on the "fine suit" that
Payne was wearing on a Sunday morning on the courthouse steps, not his
race as an attribute of his physical body. In a society where racial mixing
was common, it became increasingly difficult to identify the "race" of
people based on their physical features alone. The degree to which man-
ner of dress was equated with race in nineteenth-century Savannah is
made clear in Venture Smith's description:

I have frequently walked the streets of Savannah in an evening, and
being pretty well dressed, (generally having on a good decent suit of
clothes,) and having a light complexion, (being at least three parts
white,) on meeting the guard, I would walk as bold as I knew how,
and as much like a gentleman; they would always give me the wall.