The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown by Martha J. Cutter
Written by Michael Birkner in the Book Review category and the Fall 2023 issue Topics in this article: Henry Box Brown, Martha J. Cutter, Philadelphia, slavery
The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown
by Martha J. Cutter
University of Pennsylvania Press, 368 pp., hardcover $49.95
Brown’s ingenious escape from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, by mailing himself in a wooden postal crate to abolitionists in Philadelphia, was unique and well documented. But that is not the story that most interests the author of this elegant cultural history. Cutter focuses on how Brown turned his experience in slavery into performance art on various tracks in many different locales, including England.
Brown may not have overcome the trauma of his slave experiences, which included seeing his wife and children sold away from him, but he “learned to manage and even stage-manage” them. In Cutter’s telling, this was Brown’s “psychic redress.” Much of the book details Brown’s recasting and monetizing his understanding of slavery by creating panoramas and other theatrical performances. In doing so he was curating — as Frederick Douglass, Ellen and William Craft, and Sojourner Truth also had done — a “performative self.” Brown even created his own Uncle Tom’s Cabin panorama congruent with his own story. In Great Britain, Brown played himself in various productions of the escape narrative, as well as an African prince and even an Indian chief in a play about Pocahontas. Over time, he developed further theatrical guises, as a magician and hypnotist, winning favorable reviews and attracting good crowds. Later in life he continued to perform in Canada, where he and his new family established several different home bases.
Cutter’s interest in Brown’s “subversiveness” and “fugitivity” runs like a thread through this book, including an extended discussion of what artists and poets have made of Brown and his famous box. Impressively researched and argued as this book is, it is much more a work for scholars than interested general readers. For the basics on Brown, one can profitably consult Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, available in a paperback edited and introduced by John Ernest.
Michael J. Birkner
Gettysburg College