Letters from a Planter's Daughter: Understanding Freedom and ...

Even what the archive reveals, rather than what it hides, can tempt
researchers to exert power over historical subjects. 16 The personal distress
Susanna’s 4 June letter expresses may move a scholar to wish she could
write melodrama. 17 The significance the researcher herself attributes to a
source, or a fact within a source, can make it a fiction—a drama, a tragedy.
Retroactively, the narrator makes an historical individual a player on
a stage of her own construction. Susanna Townsend was, in her present,
an actor in the sense of an historical agent, not an actor in an historical
script written for her over a century later. When the curtain falls on Susanna
Townsend’s life, a brief enumeration of facts could all too easily turn
her into the heroine of a painful romance, perhaps the “tragic mulatta” of
nineteenth-century sentimental fiction. 18 We could write her as an orphan,
born of illicit intimacy between a white master and his slave, young and
fair and beautiful. We could emphasize her own relationship with a white
man, her unexpected pregnancy, her untimely death. We could belabor
her youth and sexual vulnerability in a plot as muddled and melodramatic
as her family history—and in all these ways turn a woman who lived and
breathed into a textual trope. In the nineteenth-century, antislavery writers
used the “tragic mulatta” to point to the evils of plantation slavery, both
in terms of sexual exploitation of women and the dangers of “miscegenation.”
Such stories contemplated what freedom and independence meant
for mixed-race women and men, characters who were “the fictional symbol
of marginality”—the very questions I wish to explore in the life of
Susanna Townsend. 19 The line between writing an historical narrative and
a romance is clearly thin, and fiction can all too often prove both easier to
execute and far more “seductive.” 20
But the attempted reconstruction of a life requires empathy, and how
can we understand or share the feelings of another person without the
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Letters from a Planter’s Daughter
16 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 26.
17 Saidiya Hartman grappled eloquently with the limitations of the archive: “History pledges
to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive, even as those dead certainties are
produced by terror. I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history,”
Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe, Vol. 26, (June 2008), 9.
18 Eva Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-
Century Antislavery Fiction. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
2004), 5.
19 Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta,” 5.
20 Marisa J. Fuentes, “Power and Historical Figuring: Rachael Pringle Polgreen’s Troubled
Archive. Gender & History, Vol. 22 (November 2010), 574.