SOURCE: Romero-Cesareo, Ivette. “Women Adrift: Madwomen, Matriarchs, and the Caribbean.” In Women at Sea: Travel Writing and the Margins of Caribbean Discourse, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, pp. 135-60. New York: Palgrave, 2001.

[In the following excerpt, Romero-Cesareo examines Seacole's use of the role of motherhood as an ennobling and legitimizing tool in her autobiography.]

The sea, alas! It is the only place to which we can be faithful.¹

—Adèle Hugo

Travel is an enterprise requiring a certain degree of camouflage. Travelers prepare for their encounters and negotiations with other social settings, languages, and physical surroundings, by donning protective lotions and garb, in an attempt to erase or accentuate the distance between Self and Other.² For women traveling through the Caribbean, this enterprise becomes a complex act, necessitating pretexts, smoke screens, and masks. The discourse of travel, then, whether written or spoken by/about mobile women, is difficult to control and categorize because of the diversity of voices, each imbued with varying strategies and intentions. When writing focuses on singular women travelers—the Nun of Alferez (Catalina de Erauso), pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, Josephine and Pauline Bonaparte (wife and sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, respectively), or Adèle Hugo (daughter of Victor Hugo)—each remarkable in her own way—the multiplicity of accounts and interpretations of their trajectories is astoundingly heterogeneous, rendering them legendary as much by hyperbolic renditions as by the impossibility of knowing which of the versions best reflects the circulating bodies behind the texts. These subjects of travel are made to clash with or conform to moral and aesthetic parameters, first provoking titillation, then reassuring that social order has been restored. When travelers do not write their own narratives, their travels and travails are presented to the reader as a prism, whereby the narrators' own journeys and frames of reference are reflected; the function of memory as self-reflexive exploration becomes the expedition of the “distanced” writer. In cases where the travelers themselves relate their ventures—the Countess of Merlin, Aphra Behn, Mary Carmichael, Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Nancy Prince, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham—one is still presented with multilayered narratives that often present contradictory tensions and stances.³ The narrators perform a dance of veils where one pose counteracts another to reveal or disguise dissent, assume traditionally accepted personae, or break with previously set discursive models.

The three women studied here—Adèle Hugo, Céline Alvarez Baa, and Mary Seacole—represent three distinct types of travelers who undertook their voyages with varying objectives in mind. The first two are closely linked: Adèle Hugo leaves Guernsey to follow her lover across the ocean to Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then to Barbados in 1866 where, as legend has it, her lovesickness culminates in insanity.⁴ Céline Alvarez Baa is the Trinidadian woman credited with rescuing a delirious and anonymous Hugo from the streets of Bridgetown; she travels to France to deliver the young woman to the arms of her celebrated father. Traveling in the 1850's, Mary Seacole (born Mary Jane Grant in 1805) is best known as the nurse who performed heroic deeds in the Crimean War. In her travel memoirs, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Mary Seacole in Many Lands (1857),⁵ Seacole—who leaves her native Jamaica to journey through Haiti, the Bahamas, Cuba, New Granada (now Panama and Colombia), England, and all the countries from there to Crimea—provides multiple reasons for traveling. While her aim seems to be to make a living, she underscores her role as mother to all English soldiers overseas—the guise of motherly concern and duty being a commonly adopted reason for travel. In writings about women travelers, motherhood appears as a repeated trope, often deployed to discursively tame a “wild” woman wandering too far from the paths of femininity.⁶ These three wayfarers stand at different points in reference to motherhood. Mary Seacole plays with this by listing the familiar terms used to address her—Mrs. Seacole, Dame Seacole, Aunty Seacole, The Mother of the Regiment, La Madre, La Mère Noire. She becomes everyone's mother and she hides behind this image to safeguard her reputation in her ambiguous role as a mobile subject. Alvarez Baa also travels as a surrogate mother—her motherly devotion is stressed in all accounts of her relationship to Adèle Hugo. Upon Adèle's arrival in France, for example, Victor Hugo, without having seen either woman, proclaims in his journal, “My poor, dear child! … The black woman who accompanies her, Madame Baa, is devoted to her” (12 February 1872).⁷ Adèle, who never becomes a mother nor displays the nurturing qualities attributed to women of her generation, is absolved by virtue of her madness. However, her condition might also be interpreted as punishment for her excessive passion and refusal to adapt to conventional models of femininity.

Motherhood is rendered all the more problematic by the dimension of race. Hugo, Alvarez Baa, and Seacole represent different points of the color spectrum: white, black, and mulatto. When narratives about or by women travelers involve racially mixed groups, it is always the woman of color who becomes the nurturing mother willing to give her life for her white sons and daughters. Although all three women were apparently childless—neither Alvarez Baa nor Seacole were known to have children of their own⁸—only the black/mulatto women assume or are ascribed the “mammy” role.⁹

The notion of the sacrifices necessary for the continuation of a white dominant group is best exemplified in the story of Madame Lacouture.¹⁰ Born in early-eighteenth-century France, Madame Lacouture travels to Louisiana and is shipwrecked off the coast of Florida with the captain of the ship, her son and daughter, and an African slave. For the sake of survival, the group ends up killing and eating the slave. Here, the white “lady” and mother cannibalizes the black male, who is stereotypically identified as a potential barbaric cannibal, in order to save her family. On the one hand, Alvarez Baa and Seacole seem to have internalized ideas of motherly self-sacrifice for the persistence of the white world, readily assuming prescribed roles set into place by slavery. On the other, the mothering role may be the passport or passe partout enabling them to negotiate physical and social boundaries and to pursue their own thirst for exploration. Both women were imbued in the expansionist and mercantilist energy of their time; they were highly mobile businesswomen involved in transporting and selling products wherever they traveled. Donning the mask of motherhood may have very well been a strategy allowing them to widen their range of movement and enterprise. …

MARY SEACOLE

As I grew into womanhood, I began to indulge that longing to travel which will never leave me while I have health and vigour.

(57)—Mary Seacole

While, for the most part, Alvarez Baa is bridled with two stereotypical roles—that of the maternal, subservient woman and that of the sexually liberated, exotic Other—perhaps in an attempt to control her, Mary Seacole ostensibly attributes the role of motherhood to herself in order to justify her mobility, while occasionally revealing a more multifaceted and complex persona. In Seacole's case, it is the traveler herself who simultaneously presents herself on center stage and analyzes her place and role in society. She is successful in representing her problematic position in the intersections of gender, race, and class. In her book, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Mary Seacole in Many Lands, she does not give much information of her travels in the Caribbean islands, and since the selling feature of her autobiography is her exemplary presence in war-torn Crimea, she details her ventures and adventures in the coastal regions of Panama as a lead-in to that “larger” historical event.

In the first chapter of her narrative, Mary Seacole identifies herself as a Jamaican Creole, a female, and a widow; but it is the issue of race that she privileges in the first few pages. When she states, “I am a Creole, and I have good Scotch blood coursing through my veins,” one is struck by the apparent pride she has in being part white, or having “good” blood, if one reads it literally. She seems to accept the standard prejudices of the English regarding the black and mulatto population by saying that she owes the “energy and activity which are not always found in the Creole race” to her Scottish blood. However, as we find her doing throughout her autobiography/travel narrative, she usually follows this type of biased comment with veiled irony or implicit reproach. For example, she states: “I have often heard the term ‘lazy Creole’ applied to my country people; but I am sure I do not know what it is to be indolent” (57). What follows is an enumeration of the qualities that have led her to travel far and wide: the impulse to be active, lack of idleness, an inclination to rove, and most important, a powerful will to carry out her wishes. These first paragraphs set the tone for the rest of the narrative, throughout which she moves back and forth between roles depending on her needs.

In describing her heroic journeys, Seacole projects herself through what has been considered the discourse prevalent in travel narratives written by men, always stressing her strong will, sense of purpose, exceptional moral and physical strength, and her overcoming of obstacles (illnesses, floods, mud slides, hostile terrain, war, plotting “natives”). These scenes alternate with depictions of herself as a well-mannered “English” lady, brewing a perfect cup of tea in spite of the odds, which is characteristic of many narratives by women travelers of the time, in particular white European travelers. But, she also seems to derive extreme pleasure in destroying the image of the meticulously dressed wayfarer by including numerous stories of mishaps: how she was covered from head to toe in mud during a long trek, or how she was drenched during a downpour.

What remains central to the text and is never contradicted by the narrator is her love of freedom. By stating early on that she is a widow and that her mother has died, she justifies her mobility. Furthermore, her profession is important because, although her main employment as a hotel-keeper and merchant was not rare for Creole women in the nineteenth century—both her mother and sister were hotelkeepers—she was the only mulatto woman known at the time to have traveled extensively to set up shops and/or inns in dangerous locales. After her mother's death, she travels to join her brother, also an innkeeper in New Granada, but she eventually leaves him to move around freely wherever she desires.

Seacole explains her desire to travel from an early age:

As I grew into womanhood, I began to indulge that longing to travel which will never leave me while I have health and vigour. I was never weary of tracing upon an old map the route to England; and never followed with my gaze the stately ships homeward bound without longing to be in them, and see the blue hills of Jamaica fade into the distance.

(57)

This quote betrays Seacole's desire to escape her reality as a colonized subject, allowing the Caribbean landscape to fade into the distance of memory. “Home” becomes England. However, she does not hesitate to illustrate the reality of her first “homecoming” trip, where she was vulnerable to jeers and insults. She carefully depicts the reception she is given because of her color, providing vivid recollections of the efforts of the London street-boys to poke fun at her and her companion's complexion:

I am only a little brown—a few shades duskier than the brunettes whom you all admire so much; but my companion was very dark, and a fair (if I can apply the term to her) subject for their rude wit. She was hot-tempered poor thing! and as there were no policemen to awe the boys and turn our servants' heads in those days, our progress through the London streets was sometimes a rather checkered one.

(58)

Judging by Seacole's witty prose, her use of the word “checkered” is hardly accidental. While we can imagine the contrasting situations the travelers encounter in London, we are also presented with a world in black and white.¹¹ Seacole often seems to fully endorse the empire, but she occasionally and very subtly casts doubts upon the picture she draws of English superiority, refinement, and generosity.

The narrator admits that some of her travels, especially those throughout the Caribbean, are often capitalist ventures motivated by the profit she makes by the “fast sale” of products she brings back: “Before I had been long in Jamaica I started upon other trips, many of them undertaken with a view to gain” (58). One must not overlook her enterprising character; Seacole was a hotelkeeper, a nurse, a doctor in folk medicine, a gold prospector, and a sutler,¹² selling provisions in war-torn Crimea. In fact, she relives and writes about her travels in order to survive financially. After the Crimean war, she goes bankrupt while living in London, and decides to earn her livelihood by writing her memoirs. This venture was unsuccessful, and despite several efforts by friends to collect funds for her, Seacole died penniless and lonely.

Another reason for Seacole's travels is to help others, for she has a true love of healing. She repeatedly stresses her skills and achievements in treating victims of cholera epidemics and war. Her comments on her vocation for healing, however, are sometimes problematic, echoing hegemonic views on the roles colonizers and colonized should play in the Caribbean context. In one instance, she suggests that Jamaican Creoles have a natural propensity to care for the English:

I think all who are familiar with the West Indies will acknowledge that Nature has been favourable to strangers in a few respects, and that one of these had been in instilling into the hearts of the Creoles an affection for English people and an anxiety for their welfare, which shows itself warmest when they are sick and suffering. I can safely appeal on this point to any one who is acquainted with life in Jamaica. Another benefit has been conferred upon them by inclining the Creoles to practise the healing art, and inducing them to seek out the simple remedies which are available for the terrible diseases by which foreigners are attacked, and which are found growing under the same circumstances which produce the ills they minister to.

(108)

While advocating ideas amenable to British rule, she also claims a knowledge that the English cannot access. They must, in a way, be dependent on their “subjects.”

Seacole also seems to travel as a representative of the English empire and to help the English soldiers overseas, whom she calls her “sons.” While Adèle Hugo seeks her English soldier, following him from barracks to barracks, and from country to country, Seacole seems to follow an unknown, symbolic soldier throughout her travels—the faceless multitude of the British troops.

Seacole prefers to see herself as the “female Ulysses.” In an interesting reversal of the classical male hero, this choice of mythological identification places her in a more empowered position, investing her “character” with decision making and drive. However, the names attributed to her change according to the varying degrees of her interlocutors' desire to control her and render her nonthreatening. Besides all the “motherly” labels mentioned at the beginning of this work, some insist on referring to her as the yellow doctress from Jamaica, the yellow woman from Jamaica with the cholera medicine, an elderly mulatto woman, a “coloured” woman, this little woman, the excellent lady, or the genial old lady. Although she seems proud to be called Mother Seacole, her motherly persona alternates with that of the adventurer. She constantly straddles two standpoints: the mother and the adventurer, the white and the black, the colonized and the colonizer.

Mary Seacole's shifting viewpoints are difficult to follow, especially where race and ethnicity are concerned. The internalization of racist views is apparent in the many instances in which she uses the word “nigger,” offers cartoonish depictions of her “black” servants with white teeth bared, or disdainfully portrays them as superstitious cowards. However, when she is shocked into the position of the discriminated Other, she shows remarkable solidarity, quickly shifting positions and defending herself and the black diaspora.¹³ She is quite aware of the prejudices that constantly surround her, although she is very careful not to accuse the English too directly; after all, her book is directed to English consumers. She consistently speaks of the virtues of the English compared to the uncouth hostility, and often savagery, of the Americans: “It was of no use giving them carving knives and forks, for very often they laid their own down to insert a dirty hairy hand into a full dish; while the floor soon bore evidence of the great national American habit of expectoration” (89). However, there are instances in which a direct accusation of the English finds its way into her critiques:

[M]y experience of travel had not failed to teach me that Americans (even from the Northern states) are always uncomfortable in the company of coloured people, and very often show this feeling in stronger ways than by sour looks and rude words. I think, if I have a little prejudice against our cousins across the Atlantic—and I do confess to a little—it is not unreasonable. I have a few shades deeper brown upon my skin which shows me related—and I am proud of the relationship—to those poor mortals whom you once held enslaved, and whose bodies America still owns. And having this bond, and knowing what slavery is; having seen with my eyes and heard with my ears proof positive of its horrors—let others affect to doubt them if they will—is it surprising that I should be somewhat impatient of the airs of superiority which many Americans have endeavoured to assume over me?

(67, emphasis added)

Here she purposely sides with all blacks, slaves and freed, from different continents, and the Other becomes both the Americans and the English, whom she is addressing when she says “you once held enslaved.” She actually does not accuse the English of ongoing prejudice; instead, she cleverly diverts the attention from them by pointing to her own prejudices. When she refers to “others” affecting to doubt the horrors of slavery, one cannot help but wonder whether she is familiar with Mrs. Carmichael's sweetening of slavery in Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White, Colored, and Negro Population of the West Indies (1833).¹⁴

Seacole suspects she is the victim of English racism when she offers her services to nurse wounded English soldiers in Crimea. After going endlessly from office to office, suffering harsh rebuffs and humiliation, she gingerly confesses: “Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and the last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?” (126). In spite of her caution, the message is clear enough. The “ladies” to whom she refers are Florence Nightingale and her entourage. Seacole was neither able to get funding from the English authorities nor to join Nightingale's corps of nurses. She had to finance her own expedition to the Crimean front.¹⁵

Seacole's description of the “candid” racism demonstrated by an American makes English prejudice pale in comparison. While offering a toast in Aunty Seacole's honor for her role in fighting a cholera epidemic in Panama, the speaker expresses regret that she is not white. You can get an idea of what he said by Seacole's fearless answer:

Gentlemen—, I return you the kindness in drinking my health. Providence evidently made me to be useful, and I can't help it. But I must say that I don't altogether appreciate your friend's kind wishes with respect to my complexion. If it had been as dark as any nigger's, I should have been just as happy and as useful, and as much respected by those whose respect I value; and as to his kind offer of bleaching me, I should, even if it were practicable, decline it without many thanks. As to the society which the process might gain me admission into, all I can say is, that, judging from the specimens I have met with here and elsewhere, I don't think that I shall lose much by being excluded from it. So, gentlemen, I drink to you and to the general reformation of American manners.

(98)

This is one of several instances where Seacole must react defensively. While she is surrounded by hard-drinking, violent men, her role as a nurturer and provider of comfort in the community assure her a certain level of safety and freedom. Her services are indispensable and she is accepted as long as she is needed.

Always aware of her shaky stature as a loved but not completely accepted English citizen, she does not adopt an official voice, but, when speaking of other colonized others, she comfortably assumes the imperialist ideology with gusto. Native Central Americans, whom she calls Spanish Indians, are treacherous and lazy compared to the industrious black population.¹⁶ They seem all the more uncivilized to her because of their lack of clothing apart from a wisp of a loincloth, and she sarcastically states: “Perhaps … the thick coating of dirt which covered them kept them warmer than more civilized clothing, besides being indisputably more economical” (68). She considers “the natives” to be “constitutionally cowardly” because they “made not the feeblest show of resistance” during the cholera epidemic (78), and is disgusted by their religious fervor and superstitions as sole response to their suffering. Their passivity and acceptance of illness and death make them childlike, but not in the least endearing, in her eyes. Their barbarous nature is suggested by a description of their foods that vaguely alludes to cannibalism: “The native fare was not tempting, and some of their delicacies were absolutely disgusting. With what pleasure, for instance, could one foreign to their tastes and habits dine off a roasted monkey, whose grilled head bore a strong resemblance to a negro baby's? … They were worse still stewed in soup, when it was positively frightful to dip your ladle in unsuspectingly, and bring up what closely resembles a brown baby's limb” (46).

Seacole's musings on other women are much more complex. She focuses on two types of cross-dressing women travelers—gold-diggers going to or from California and dancers touring South America. In some instances Seacole seems to disapprove of the women who disguise their gender and to interpret cross-dressing as rejection of womanhood: “The women alone kept aloof from each other, and well they might; for, while a very few seemed not ashamed of their sex, it was somewhat difficult to distinguish the majority from their male companions, save by their bolder and more reckless voice and manner” (71). At times, she seems to resent the degree of freedom and power of the “unnatural,” “indecent,” cross-dressing gold prospectors, and she makes a point to set herself apart as a decent lady observing what to her seems to be an aberration:

Although many of the women on their way to California showed clearly enough that the life of license they sought would not be altogether unfamiliar to them, they still retained some appearance of decency in their attire and manner; but in many cases (as I have before said) the female companions of the successful gold-diggers appeared in no hurry to resume the dress or obligations of their sex. Many were clothed as the men were, in flannel shirts and boots; rode their mules in an unfeminine fashion, but with much ease and courage, and in their conversation successfully rivaled the coarseness of their lords. I think, on the whole, that those French lady writers who desire to enjoy the privileges of man, with the irresponsibility of the other sex, would have been delighted with the disciples who were carrying their principles into practice in the streets of Cruces.

(73)

When she writes of a cross-dressing woman traveler more notable than the anonymous female gold-diggers, Lola Montez, the Irish woman who became a “Spanish” dancer, Seacole cannot seem to choose between a purely moral judgment and a respect for power. She labels her as evil and wretched although her description of Montez reveals a degree of hidden admiration in spite of her apparent disdain: “Came one day Lola Montes [sic], in the full zenith of her evil fame, bound for California, with a strange suite. A good-looking, bold woman, with fine, bad eyes, and a determined bearing; dressed ostentatiously in perfect male attire, with shirt-collar turned down over a velvet lapelled coat, richly worked shirt-front, black hat, French unmentionables [trousers], and natty, polished boots with spurs” (91). The veiled admiration might be a reaction to Montez' skill with her “handsome riding whip” when “an impertinent American, presuming—perhaps not unnatural—upon her reputation, laid hold jestingly of the tails of her long coat, and as a lesson received a cut across his face that must have marked him for some days” (91). The triumph of a female over a physically stronger male, especially an ill-mannered American, merits Seacole's attention and respect.

Seacole's own identification as a woman is very cautious. By telling her own story, she survives the eroticization imposed upon other women of color such as Alvarez Baa. She avoids all mention of her own sexuality and only occasionally comments on her “not altogether unpleasant” appearance, her plumpness, and the attention she attracted to herself throughout her travels: “time and trouble combined, have left me with a well-filled-out, portly frame, the envy of many an angular Yankee female” (131). Remarking on the way she turned the heads of the Greeks, Turks, English, and French in the Bosphorus, she says: “I accepted it all as a compliment to a stout female tourist, neatly-dressed in a red or yellow dress, a plain shawl of some other colour, and a simple straw wide-awake, with bright red streamers. I flattered myself that I woke up sundry sleepy-eyed Turks, who seemed to think that the great object of life was to avoid showing surprise at everything; while the Turkish women gathered around me and jabbered about me, in the most flattering manner” (132). She further sets herself apart from other roving women, especially the “Yankee female,” by underlying her respectability:

My present life was not agreeable for a woman with the least refinement; and of female society I had none. Indeed, the females who crossed my path were about as unpleasant specimens as one would wish to avoid.

In the same section, she simultaneously stresses her moral and racial difference from other women travelers, particularly North Americans:

With very few exceptions, those who were not bad were very disagreeable, and, as the majority came from the Southern States of America, and showed an instinctive repugnance against anyone whose countenance claimed for her kindred with slaves, my position was far from a pleasant one.

(100)

The “instinctive repugnance” seems to be mutual, but despite her negative reaction to the traveling American woman, Seacole recognizes her contradictory feelings toward them:

Not that it ever gave me any annoyance: they were glad of my stores and comforts, I made money out of their wants; nor do I think our bond of connection was ever close; only this, if any of them came to me sick or suffering (I say this out of simple justice for myself) I forgot everything except that she was my sister and that it was my duty to help her.

(100)

In a typically picaresque gesture, whereby she reveals her commercial motivation, Seacole admits to the practical fruits sown through her encounter with the other.¹⁷ At the same time, she proclaims her solidarity with women, regardless of color or class boundaries, by considering them her “sisters.”

Ultimately, what sets Seacole apart from Hugo, Alvarez Baa, and most of the women she writes about, is the freedom to portray herself as she wishes, to mask and unmask herself as she deems necessary.¹⁸ In “When the Subaltern Travels: Slave Narratives and Testimonial Erasure in the Contact Zone,” Mario Cesareo points out the contestatory rhetorical stances made possible to typically marginalized women (for example, ex-slave Mary Prince) through the adoption of varying poses and positionings in their travel writing:

The narrative commands through its silences, disguises, and omissions—the sublime and sentimental tendencies that constitute its protagonist as a heroic model of female abnegation, intelligence, thrift, and containment; in other words, through a text that produces its other as an instance of a striving toward feminine-bourgeois subjectivity. But the restricted sentimentality of the narrative, while problematizing the subaltern's subjectivity (in fact, because of it) opens a contestatory space where the confrontation of metropolitan social forces takes place.

(118-119)

The text, he says, does more than play into the aesthetics of sentimentality:

[I]t performs a rhetorical operation of political reconfiguration of the terms of its reception in its effort to carry on a political intervention. It does so by displacing the narration from the reified forms of survival literature that the slave narrative had acquired in the eighteenth century, to the concrete discussion of slavery as a form of economic production that brings about the degradation of the human person.

(119)

Although he is speaking specifically of Mary Prince's narrative and the English antislavery discourse that precedes Seacole's travel and writing, the same strategies are deployed by this woman who was born free. In the final analysis of her work, Seacole's true solidarity resides in her sense of justice; in this case, race supersedes gender. Although her apparent purpose for writing her autobiography is economic survival, her underlying agenda seems to be to denounce the suffering of people because of their color. She attacks the Southern United States for preserving slavery and she subtly points out that the English are not altogether devoid of racism, despite having abolished slavery far before the Americans. In a touching anecdote of great liberatory value, Seacole explains how the Central Americans were anxious to offer freedom and hints on how to escape to the slaves who accompanied American travelers:

A young American woman whose character can be best described by the word “vicious,” fell ill at Gorgona, and was left behind by her companions under the charge of a young negro, her slave, whom she treated most inhumanly, as was evinced by the poor girl's frequent screams when under the lash: one night her cries were so distressing that Gorgona could stand it no longer, but broke into the house and found the chattel bound hand and foot, naked, and being severely lashed. Despite the threats and astonishment of the mistress, they were both carried off and the following morning, before the alcalde [mayor], himself a man of colour, and of a very humane disposition.

(102)

Throughout the account, Seacole opposes the mulatto alcalde's “humane disposition” to the vicious nature of the white mistress and celebrates his decision to pronounce the young slave a free woman despite the mistress' “fearful threats.” Emphasizing the white woman's evil character, Seacole details her attempts to impede the slave's departure. “Then, with demoniac refinement of cruelty,” the mistress threatens to torture the slave's young child, still in New Orleans, if the mother dared accept the offer of freedom. At this point in the narrative, Seacole includes herself in the liberating enterprise of the Gorgona townspeople: “but we knew very well that when the heat of passion had subsided, this threatener would be too ‘cute’ to injure her own property; and at once, set afloat a subscription for the purchase of the child” (102). As part of the liberating front, Seacole not only enforces change in her encounter with an oppressor, but she also reinforces the action through her writing.

Seacole establishes her power as an authoritative narrator thus: “unless I am allowed to tell the story of my life in my own way, I cannot tell it at all” (185). Telling the story in “her own way” allows her to transcend the limitations of those who were written about. Adèle Hugo, Céline Alvarez Baa, and Mary Seacole have greater mobility than their nineteenth-century counterparts by virtue of their individual “differences” or “eccentricities.” These ex-centric, or marginal, positionings enable them to circulate from margins to center and back again despite the physical obstacles and societal constraints. However, it is Seacole's writings that enable her to address and recomform the paradigms of both margins and centers.

Notes

1. Frances V. Guille. Le Journal d'Adèle Hugo. Vol. I (Paris: Minard, 1968), 343. Subsequent page references will appear in parentheses in the text.

2. Writing about her life in Antigua and St. Kitts in 1774 and 1776, Janet Schaw proudly proclaims: “As to your humble Servant, I have always set my face to the weather; wherever I have been. I hope you have no quarrel at brown beauty.” Journal of a Lady of Quality; Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal in the Years 1774 to 1776. Edited by Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934), 115. Such a statement is paradoxical, coming from an apologist for eighteenth-century slavery and plantation life; it indicates a desire to set herself apart from other European female counterparts, who strove to maintain their rosy cheeks and pale complexions, while closing the distance between herself and the dark-skinned people she believed had no human emotions and were born to bear pain. For an in-depth study of these contradictions, see Elizabeth A. Bowles, “Janet Schaw and the Aesthetics of Colonialism.” In Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics: 1716-1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

3. I discuss notions of hybridity and contradictory discursive stances in “Travelers Possessed: Generic Hybrids and the Caribbean,” forthcoming in Anthropology and Literature: Estranged Bedfellows? Edited by Rose DeAngelis (London and Newark: Gordon and Breach, 2000).

4. Romanticized descriptions of Hugo's illness as provoked by disillusion in love are standard fare.

5. Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Mary Seacole in Many Lands (London: James Blackwood, 1857).

6. As Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert discusses in this volume (“Cross-dressing on the Margins of Empire: Women Pirates and the Narrative of the Caribbean”), the highly eroticized concealment and disclosure of the breasts and the revelation of impending motherhood are crucial to rendering the pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read palatable or manageable to their narrators/readers.

7. Quoted in Hubert Juin's Victor Hugo: 1870-1885. Vol. III (France: Flammarion, 1986), 127.

8. Alexis Sawyer, in Sawyer's Culinary Campaign (London: Routledge, 1857), describes a light-skinned young woman, Sarah, whom he believes to be Mary Seacole's daughter. On the one hand, he opposes her “whiteness” to Seacole's dark complexion—“an old dame of a jovial appearance, but a few shades darker than the white lily”; “La Mère Noire, although she has a fair daughter”—and, on the other, she emphasizes her “exotic” black-haired, blue-eyed beauty by calling her “the dark Maid of the Eastern War” and “the Egyptian beauty.” See the Editor's introduction to Seacole's Wonderful Adventures (43).

9. See Patricia Hill Collins's “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images.” In Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1990).

10. See Ferdinand Denis's Les Vrais Robinsons: naufrages, solitudes, voyages (Paris: Librairie du Magasin Pittoresque, 1863). Quoted in Richard Cortambert's Les Illustres Voyageuses (Paris: E. Maillet, 1866).

11. We must observe the nineteenth-century usage of the word “checkered” in other contexts and in view of Seacole's systematic critique of North American slavery. Her wit and awareness of the power of language and its signifiers are evidenced by the following quote from an abolitionist's letter attesting to the horrors of slavery: “I beg in reply to state that the whole of the back part of her [Mary Prince's] body is distinctively scarred and, as it were, checkered with the vestiges of severe floggings.” See Moira Ferguson's introduction to The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (London: Pandora, 1987), 138.

12. A sutler is a merchant who follows an army, selling goods to the soldiers.

13. Seacole explains the prejudice of the people of New Granada (Panama and Colombia) against North Americans by contrasting the much-improved conditions of the black population in these areas to the lives of those who traveled north: “In the first place, many of the negroes, fugitives from the Southern States, had sought refuge in these and the other States of Central America, where every profession was open to them; and as they were generally superior men—evinced perhaps by their hatred of their old condition and successful flight—they soon rose to positions of eminence in New Granada. In the priesthood, in the army, in all municipal offices, the self-liberated negroes were invariably found in the foremost rank; and the people, for some reason—perhaps because they recognise in them superior talents for administration—always respected them more than, and preferred them to, their native rulers” (100).

14. Mary Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of the White, Colored, and Negro Population of the West Indies. 2 Vols. (London: Whittaker, 1833).

15. Ironically, Seacole now figures, albeit in a very marginal capacity, in the Florence Nightingale Museum in London, where one can find a small section dedicated to her work. Her autobiography is sold in the museum's shop.

16. Seacole's acquired baggage also weighs down her encounters with Spaniards, Maltese, Greeks, Turks, and Russians, whom she depicts as thieves, liars, cheaters, or cowards. Only her Greek assistant, “Jew Johnny,” and a generous Turkish pasha who helps her with her commercial enterprise, barely survive her harsh criticism. The rest are judged by the same (mostly negative) models of “orientalist” discourse prevalent at the time.

17. For an in-depth study of the picaresque elements in nineteenth-century travel and slave narrative, see Mario Cesareo's “When the Subaltern Travels: Slave Narrative and Testimonial Erasure in the Contact Zone” in this volume.

18. Some of these women did write. It would be interesting to compare, for instance, Lola Montez's autobiography to Seacole's.