The Invisible Line

Review by Wilbert Rideau

Published: February 21 2011 02:09 | Last updated: February 21 2011 02:09

The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, by Daniel J Sharfstein, Penguin, RRP$27.95, 416 pages

In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act to allow slave owners to pursue and recapture runaway slaves in states that did not permit slavery. In practice, the Act allowed Southern-sympathisers in the North to swear out a slave warrant on any black person, thereby unintentionally terrorising even free people of colour by putting them at risk of being kidnapped and sold to plantation owners in the South. (Federal court commissioners were paid $10 for finding a defendant to be a slave but only $5 for declaring him free.) A second unintended consequence of the Act was to strengthen the resolve of abolitionists to defeat slavery and deny slave-catchers their quarry.

In The Invisible Line, these two unintended consequences meet in Ohioan Orindatus Simon Bolivar Wall, the freed son of a slave woman and white gentleman farmer, who himself became a successful tradesman and planter. “[T]he idea that he, his wife, and their children could be kidnapped and taken south – that the government and courts had every incentive to abet such a crime – was enough to drive him to contemplate violence,” explains Daniel J Sharfstein, law professor at Vanderbilt University. Wall helped lead a mob of armed white and black abolitionists as they stormed the hotel where a slave-catcher was holding a fugitive slave. It is a tense scene that violates every preconception ordinary Americans have about race relations in the antebellum period.

In this meticulously researched history, Sharfstein’s ace-in-the-hole is his ability to recreate dramatic events and build flesh-and-blood characters from courthouse records, family letters, or forgotten contemporaneous accounts. He sets out to change the way we think about race, and he succeeds brilliantly in showing us that before politics began hardening colour lines in the run-up to the civil war, pragmatism often trumped prejudice.

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For example, Clarsy Centers, a young white Appalachian woman with a child in arms who encounters Kentuckian George Freeman, a more prosperous free man of colour twice her age, and bears him 10 children. We learn that “English servant women had children with African men in numbers that continually alarmed Virginia’s lawmakers”, and gave birth to some of America’s first communities of free people of colour. Sharfstein gives us Gideon Gibson, a free man of colour, himself a planter and slave-owner in antebellum America, whom the South Carolina Assembly in 1768 declined to classify as Negro because the intermingling of races was so widespread that “[w]ithout a flexible rule, few people could make a secure claim of being white”.

As Sharfstein traces the fortunes and the descendants of these families, we meet people of colour who are unaware of their racial heritage: Gibson’s Louisiana descendant Randall Gibson, is a “white” slave-owning bigot. Among contemporary “whites” who learn of their black ancestry, some think it’s “cool”; others greet the news with a sense of guilt, attesting to continuing ambivalence about racial identity even in “post-racial” America.

That’s fascinating. But for me, what makes this book a must-read are Sharfstein’s revelations about antebellum America. In 1835, South Carolina’s highest court ruled that a person’s racial status “is not to be determined solely by the distinct and visible mixture of negro blood, but by reputation, by his reception into society, and his having commonly exercised the privileges of a white man … [A] man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability should have the rank of a white man”. The language is racial and applies only to free men, but it foreshadows a sensibility not unlike what Martin Luther King Jr, in 1963, dreamed for all Americans: a nation where people will not be judged by their skin colour but by the content of their character.

Wilbert Rideau is author of ‘In the Place of Justice’ (Profile)

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