A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life

By Eliza Potter and Xiomara Santamarina

Here is the first fully annotated edition of a landmark in early African American literature--Eliza Potter's 1859 autobiography, A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life. Potter was a freeborn black woman who, as a hairdresser, was in a unique position to hear about, receive confidences from, and observe wealthy white women--and she recorded it all in a revelatory book that delighted Cincinnati's gossip columnists at the time. But more important is Potter's portrait of herself as a wage-earning woman, proud of her work, who earned high pay and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation's earliest "beauticians" at a time when most black women worked at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Because her work offered insights into the private lives of elite white women, Potter carved out a literary space that featured a black working woman at the center, rather than at the margins, of the era's transformations in gender, race, and class structure. Xiomara Santamarina provides an insightful introduction to this edition that includes newly discovered information about Potter, discusses the author's strong satirical voice and proud working-class status, and places the narrative in the context of nineteenth-century literature and history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9780807898666

Eliza Potter

Eliza Potter (born 1820) was an African-American hairdresser in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Acknowledgments

A Note on the Text

INTRODUCTION

Eliza Potter:

Black Working Woman,

Author, and Social Critic

Suggested Readings

THE AUTHOR’S APPEAL

Chapter 1. My Debut

Chapter 2. England

Chapter 3. America

Chapter 4. Saratoga

Chapter 5. Leaving Saratoga—

Burning of the Baggage Car—

Visit to New York

Chapter 6. Newport—The Maid’s Story

Chapter 7. Minnie

Chapter 8. Natchez—New Orleans

Chapter 9. Cincinnati

APPENDIX A

Biographical Information on

Eliza Potter (1820?–1893)

Libraries and Collections

Newspapers and City Directories

APPENDIX B

Newspaper Reviews of

A Hairdresser’s Experience in

High Life

Cincinnati Daily Commercial, October 19, 1859, New Books, p. 1, col. 3

Cincinnati Daily Gazette, October 19, 1859, p. 2, cols. 3 and 4

Cincinnati Daily Commercial, A Reviewer Reviewed, October 20, 1859, p. 2, col. 2

Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Fits, October 21, 1859, p. 2, col. 1

Cincinnati Daily Commercial, October 22, 1859, p. 2, col. 2

Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, October 23, 1859, p. 2

New York Times, October 24, 1859, p. 2, col. 3

Notes

1

© 2009 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker and set in Dante

with Edwardian Script and Bickham swashes for display

by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence

and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines

for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

The University of North Carolina Press has been a

member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Potter, Eliza.

A hairdresser’s experience in high life / Eliza Potter ;

edited and with an introduction by Xiomara Santamarina.

          p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3335-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8078-5982-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

eISBN : 9780807898666

    1. Potter, Eliza. Hairdresser’s experience in high life.

    2. United States—Social life and customs—1783–1865.

    3. Women—United States—History—19th century.

    4. Potter, Eliza.

    5. African Americans—Ohio—Cincinnati—Biography.

    6. Beauty operators—Ohio—Cincinnati—Biography.

    7. Cincinnati (Ohio)—Biography.

    I. Santamarina, Xiomara. II. Title.

       E166.P86 2009

       973.6'092—dc22

    [ B ]

       2009018547

CLOTH 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

PAPER 13 12 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the various individuals and institutions that made this edition possible. For their generous and timely financial support, my thanks go to the Institution for Research on Women and Gender and the Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan. For their assistance, I wish to thank Pen Bogert, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky; Bill Markley, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus; Chuck Kallendorf, Cincinnati Law Library Association, Cincinnati, Ohio; Jim Pritchard, Kentucky Department of Archives and Libraries, Frankfort; Theresa Leininger-Miller, University of Cincinnati; Stephen Middleton, North Carolina State University, Raleigh; the staff at the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan; Emily Lutinski; and John Ernest. I am also grateful to Sian Hunter and the University of North Carolina Press production staff for their unfailing patience and support of this project during its long gestation. Finally, Robert S. Levine offered invaluable feedback and much-needed humor during this entire process; gracias, compai.

A Note on the Text

This volume reprints the 1859 first edition of A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, published in Cincinnati by Rickey and Mallory. I have silently corrected obvious printer’s errors and the placement of some punctuation marks; otherwise, this edition retains mid-nineteenth-century usages and spellings, as well as Potter’s at times idiosyncratic syntax. I have annotated proper names and locations, as well as noteworthy events, when it has been possible to do so.

INTRODUCTION

Eliza Potter

Black Working Woman, Author, & Social Critic

This edition of A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859) brings new visibility to a black woman’s autobiography that challenges many of our ideas about nineteenth-century African American history and literature. A firsthand account of work, race, and femininity, A Hairdresser’s Experience speaks to the possibilities for working womanhood that dressing white women’s hair offered a black working woman in the United States before the Civil War. The author, Eliza Potter, was a freeborn African American woman who migrated west from New York in the 1830s to become one of antebellum Cincinnati’s most popular hairdressers. Even though many in her day devalued black women’s work, Potter based her claims to public authority over her clients and readers in her work: her book offers modern readers the critical voice of a working woman who deftly manages to turn the tables on her white elite female clients—women who by virtue of their race and class were considered her social superiors. The fact that she earned high wages and accumulated quite a bit of money as one of the nation’s earliest beauticians to white social-climbing women when the majority of black women worked as laundresses at the bottom of the occupational ladder only enhances the piquancy of Potter’s text.

A Hairdresser’s Experience provides insights into the ways that black working women—one of the nation’s most marginal populations—were able to shape their identities as entrepreneurs and social critics, long before the twentieth-century advent of the better-known Madame C. J. Walker. Published in Cincinnati, a border city on the Ohio River between North and South, on the eve of the Civil War, this autobiography illustrates how black women authors addressed white reading publics outside the abolitionist circles with which they were most closely associated at the time, when they were viewed principally as reformers working for the common good as abolitionists, teachers, and temperance activists. It exemplifies one working woman’s engagements with the political contradictions at play in a rapidly industrializing nation that strenuously promoted democratic equality, even as it perpetuated slavery, racism, and economic disparities.

This edition also offers many book reviews of A Hairdresser’s Experience, reprinted in appendix B, to help modern readers place this text into a reception context that speaks to its significance, then and now.

Eliza Potter’s authorship illustrates perfectly how black authors’ drive for social legitimacy in a racist nation encompassed multiple identities and negotiation with multiple publics, or reading audiences. While many black authors of her time were most concerned with the dynamics of race and U.S. racial domination, Potter based her life story on her successful work history and the mobility this work offered. Because her travels offered insights into the sufferings and domestic bitterness of elites—and, in particular, of elite white women—Potter the author carved out a literary space that features a black working woman at the center, rather than at the margins, of the era’s transformations in gender, race, and class structures.

This representation of herself as a black working woman observer-participant speaks to Potter’s aspirations for local status as an arbiter of social relations in modernizing Cincinnati: she claims to be a social critic who can speak to the social anxieties associated with the era’s commercial revolutions when she confronts abolitionism and its politics of racial representation (from an antislavery perspective), and when she exposes the often-overlooked phenomenon of black ownership of slaves in the Deep South. The critical vantage point of a social critic enables Potter to offer her readers unusual analyses of slavery and southern interracial relations that foreground the role of class in the formation of free blacks’ status in the South and the contributions free black workers (about 2 percent of the North’s population) made to the nation’s industrialization. Lastly, as a self-identified working woman, Eliza Potter authored a work and travel narrative that celebrated national narratives of economic individualism, westward expansion, and manifest destiny, even as it also testified to the erosion of workers’ authority in an increasingly unequal society. Whether derived from her mobility, her skilled occupation, or simply her personal qualities, Eliza Potter offers insights into black authors’ diverse experiences and the ways in which these experiences contradict our expectations of a unitary black subject and of racially representative texts.

The form and content of A Hairdresser’s Experience offers new perspectives on the nineteenth-century emergence of African American autobiography. In the 1970s and 1980s, literary scholars in the field established the centrality of autobiographies—for the most part written by former male slaves, though not exclusively—to the development of African American literature. In this regard, the title of William Andrews’s volume on the subject, To Tell a Free Story, aptly summarizes nineteenth-century black autobiographers’ efforts to make the case for African Americans’ freedom (from slavery and racism) by addressing predominantly white and racist audiences: the common focus in these autobiographies follows the narrator’s journey from slavery and racial domination to the acquisition of freedom. Through the auspices of a metaphorical upward trajectory—from slavery to freedom, from South to North, and from spiritually damned to saved—black men described their struggles to assert their masculinity in a culture that delegitimated them at every turn.

Concurrently, black feminist literary scholars have reconstructed the often-overlooked role of nineteenth-century black women authors in literary public spheres, principally those of antebellum abolition and reform (e.g., temperance). These scholars have explored how preachers Zilpha Elaw (1790–?) and Jarena Lee (1783–?), former slaves Mary Prince (1788–?) and Harriet Jacobs (1815–97), and freeborn traveler Nancy Prince (1799–?) autobiographically represented their womanly attributes as religious leaders and abolitionists, as well as their commitment to collective efforts to uplift blacks in a culture that featured black women negatively, either as hypersexualized women or defeminized field workers.¹ The best-known autobiography today, Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself (1861), has drawn the most attention from modern readers with its unusually frank discussion of slave women’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation. As a slave mother-narrator who sacrifices her reputation to expose slavery’s abuse of slave women, Jacobs was able to insert herself in black women’s literary reform traditions. In contrast, Eliza Potter’s text, like those published by other working women, including Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig (1859) and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes (1868), maintains a somewhat ambiguous status within the protest and reform veins that dominate African American literary history. Given the prominence of abolition and reform impulses in legitimating the black woman author, the economically independent (often single) black working women who publicized their paid labor, which was neither domestic nor reform oriented, represented something of a break from this tradition. These women’s descriptions of their economic independence—especially those offered by women without family ties—potentially challenged the free black community’s claims to African Americans’ adherence to bourgeois propriety, respectability, and antebellum middle-class gender norms.² Scholars’ continuing efforts to recover long out-of-print texts like these offer us valuable opportunities to expand the critical and interpretive frameworks through which we view the histories of black authorship in North America.

Potter’s claim to literary authority as a social critic parallels the ways in which black reformers claimed the authority to criticize slavery and northern racism. However, her travel trajectory—from east to west and from New York to Ohio—cuts across the North-South geographic and slave-free symbolic imaginaries of black narrators’ quests for freedom, literary and otherwise. In sharp contrast to the arduous journeys to freedom that Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, and Harriet Wilson related in their autobiographies, A Hairdresser’s Experience asserts the hairdresser’s freedom from the very beginning: Potter proudly assures her readers in her second paragraph that she was at liberty to choose my own course. This opening declaration of independence and geographic mobility by a black author marks a departure in African American rhetorical traditions, not simply travel itineraries.

Unfortunately, we know very little about Eliza Potter because she was a member of a population difficult to locate in our historical records. What little we do know makes her even more enigmatic. According to one census record ( June 1860), Potter was born in 1820 in New York, though the dates and events she describes suggest she was probably born earlier, perhaps as early as 1812. According to another census listing from Niagara Falls two months later, she was born in Virginia. Regardless of this discrepancy, we do know that at the time that Potter published A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life she had lived intermittently in Cincinnati for more than twenty years. Potter (whose birth name remains unknown) arrived in Cincinnati sometime in 1834 as part of a wave of western migration that had started with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. Around this time, numerous African Americans sought to capitalize on the frontier’s labor shortage by migrating in large numbers to the West, despite the black laws that sought to curtail their entry into the region and the racial violence that followed them wherever they went: in 1829 African Americans represented almost 10 percent of Cincinnati’s total population. A Hairdresser’s Experience suggests that, as one of those migrants, Potter saw herself as a participant in the nation’s western expansion and in the new forms of mobility this expansion offered. In this way, Potter also offers us glimpses into the less documented dimensions of nineteenth-century African Americans’ participation in nationalist ideals of manifest destiny.³

During the first five to eight years after her arrival in the border city, Potter supported herself as nanny and domestic servant to many of the city’s affluent white families. Given the status of these families (who are for the most part identifiable, though she refers to them only by initials as was the custom of the day), it appears that Potter established herself from the beginning with an elite clientele, which supports her claim to having been brought up among the "people of ton" (a French term for fashionable circles). Potter’s employment with these families during the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s provided her opportunities for wide-ranging travels, including trips to Europe and several regions of the United States, among them New York, Boston, Washington, D.C., and the South.

For all her loquacity about her employers in her narrative, Potter maintains a frustratingly strict silence about her family life. Moreover, she explicitly eschews many of the sentimental familial identifications that were important to women authors from that era. Perhaps the best example of her rejection of these feminine sentimental norms is her irreverent description of marriage—often the central element in women’s texts—as a weakness to which she had succumbed. Yet, a review of A Hairdresser’s Experience identifies Potter as the former Mrs. Johnson, confirming that Potter married a second time (at least). On December 8, 1853, Eliza Johnson and Howard Potter were married in Cincinnati; he was much younger than she, and a widower, since the 1860 census entry lists her as living with two children, Kate (eleven) and James (nine) Potter, both born in Pennsylvania before their marriage. Howard Potter, identified as a drayman (a delivery man), died in May 1860, seven months after A Hairdresser’s Experience appeared in Cincinnati. That suggests that Potter may have decided to publish her work history in anticipation of having to support her sick husband’s family. In any case, Potter herself disappears from the record with a last entry in the Cincinnati City directory of 1861: the subsequent data we have after her departure from Cincinnati is very sketchy, though it suggests that Potter eventually returned to New York State and may have died there in 1893.

Perhaps the most remarkable life event that Potter chose to reveal to her readers occurred shortly after her arrival in the Midwest, while working as a nurse for a Cincinnati family. During a visit to Louisville, Potter told a slave how to flee north—probably on the Underground Railroad—at a time when Kentucky officials had begun prosecuting abolitionists who helped slaves escape.⁴ On her return to Cincinnati, Potter was extradited to Louisville, jailed for three months, tried, and acquitted. (The details of the case suggest prosecutors lacked evidence that Potter had provided material assistance to a fugitive.) Potter’s reference to a concurrent trial from that time has allowed us to date her case to early 1834, but hard evidence of this trial remains to be found. Nonetheless, Potter’s account of the incident appears true in most of its particulars. She describes the abolitionist and antiabolitionist sentiment that her case provoked in Cincinnati and names superior court judges from the city who could easily have refuted her claims when A Hairdresser’s Experience appeared in 1859. This event dramatizes both the risks Potter took by acting in accordance with her conscience and the high stakes associated with such risks. The fact that Potter chose to relocate temporarily to Madison, Indiana—a strongly abolitionist town—rather than return directly to Cincinnati after her acquittal suggests that she thought it was a good idea to keep a low profile in the event’s aftermath, even if her account makes this interlude appear briefer than it may have been. From material elsewhere in the narrative, we can surmise that Potter’s exile from Cincinnati appears to have lasted two or even three years. Potter’s choice in 1859 to describe a historically distant event of which her clients at the time would likely have had no knowledge suggests she recognized that abolitionism in Cincinnati had gained enough ground in the intervening twenty-five years for her to bring this into the open and to take credit for her intrepidness.⁵

Potter eventually did return to Cincinnati, apparently with reputation unsullied, and resumed employment in the capacity of nurse (or nanny) with many of the city’s well-known families, including the Longworths, Burnets, Andersons, and McLeans. These prominent families included some of the city’s wealthiest businessmen, real estate owners, lawyers, and judges (among them U.S. Supreme Court justices), and their status testifies to Potter’s popularity as the servant of elites. Shortly after returning, the hairdresser embarked for France in February, 1841, with a family headed by Nathaniel C. McLean (son of U.S. Supreme Court Justice McLean), which included his wife, Caroline Burnet, and their young daughter, Rebeca. Potter’s account of this time, like all her travel stories, focuses mostly on her sightseeing and incorporates few details about her duties as Rebeca McLean’s nurse. Instead, she affirms proudly: I saw more in France than Americans of the highest position see generally. She also relates her departure from this family and her subsequent peregrinations alone through France and England, after having argued with her employer, McLean (a future Union general), when he reneged on his promise to pay her U.S. wages.

While employed in Paris in 1841, the European capital of fashion, Potter acquired a skill that would be central to her later success: she learned to dress hair, a highly valued and well-paid occupation central to an emerging beauty industry that offered women unprecedented opportunities as workers and as consumers. The following year, 1842, Potter traveled to England, where she worked and did more sightseeing during the summer months, after which time she departed for the United States, returning to New York in November 1842. After her return to Cincinnati, Potter took up hairdressing as a full-time and highly lucrative occupation at the precise moment that the trade in women’s beauty began to flower.⁶ Her skills in dressing hair and, perhaps more important, in dealing with her socially aspiring clients, opened the way for Potter to embark on a remarkably well-paid profession that was clearly exceptional among all women, black or white.⁷

Potter’s focus on Cincinnati in her longest and final chapter suggests that her greatest investment as author lay in engaging directly with her Cincinnati readers who, as past employers and potential purchasers of her book are at the heart of this autobiography. Notwithstanding this local emphasis, however, the narrative speaks to Potter’s belief that her cosmopolitan travels were key to cultivating literary authority among her clients and readers: subsequent to the three relatively brief opening chapters that detail her westward migration, her trip to Europe, and her eventual return to Cincinnati, the chapters bear the titles of places she had visited— England, Saratoga, Newport—and they meticulously detail the scope of Potter’s profitable travels across the United States, including Saratoga Springs, New York; New York City; Providence, Rhode Island; and points south, principally Natchez and New Orleans. In this vein, Potter, like other black authors of her day—former slave William Wells Brown and freeborn Nancy Prince among them—tapped into the travel narrative’s popularity among a wide spectrum of readers.⁸ Still, the narrative’s focus on high life in Cincinnati and, in particular, on the social lives of the city’s elite white women distinguishes A Hairdresser’s Experience from the vast majority of texts in a nineteenth-century African American literary canon predominantly concerned with racial freedom, literacy, and equality. Not surprisingly, early scholarship on this text reflects the narrative’s focus on Cincinnati society.⁹

Potter’s residence in Cincinnati, her occupation, and her text’s publication in a city where she had attained an exceptional social and economic status and a large clientele offered her a singular opportunity to challenge white readers’ skepticism of black women’s cultural authority. At a time when anxious white Americans debated the future role of free blacks in a nation that would outlaw slavery—how, they wondered, could they incorporate presumably inferior blacks into Anglo-American society?—Potter’s revelations of her clients’ shortcomings redirected her readers’ focus onto the failures of Cincinnati’s elite women to live up to public expectations. As one review corroborated: "Before her graphic narrative, like the spear of Ithuriel [a reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost], the illusions that cloud the common fancy disappear like dew before the orb of day; the aroma of divinity with which, aided by imagination, art, French fabrics and perfumery, we are in the habit of investing the lovely creatures in whose sweet faces all the virtues seem to be reflected, is dissipated to return no more forever" (Cincinnati Daily Gazette, October 20, 1859). As the wives and daughters of the city’s commercial class, Potter’s elite clients had high profiles in the city’s many social and cultural spheres, and this exposed them to public and avid scrutiny, much in the way that celebrities are scrutinized today. This group of fashionable women was a predominantly Anglo-descended population that served as a kind of index of the city’s success: along with their husbands, they were perceived as the most prominent beneficiaries of the city’s seemingly overnight transformation from a forest clearing to an urban center with the potential to rival eastern cities.¹⁰

What Potter publicized was the flip side of this success, the deleterious effects of the city’s astonishing change to the very class that had most benefited from it: No one need go into alleys to hunt up wretchedness, she assured her readers, they can find it in perfection among the rich and fashionable of every land and nation. Potter was tapping into modern publics’ fascination with the rich and famous and the underlying assumption that wealth could be the summum bonum of life in a liberal, market-based society.

Against this background of rapid socioeconomic change, Cincinnati— affectionately nicknamed the Queen City—offered its denizens a sense of social fluidity and the potential to break new ground. But, ironically, the city’s astonishing commercial prosperity also produced deep cultural anxiety among many of its newly prosperous citizens. This anxiety was a local version of what one historian has referred to as a national crisis in confidence: Cincinnati’s dependence on face-to-face personal contact in commercial exchanges magnified its citizens fears that unscrupulous men or women—confidence men and painted women—could potentially pass as respectable ladies and gentlemen when they might indeed be shams, out to make quick money or obtain an entry into social circles above their station.¹¹ In such a fluid society, how could social distinctions be maintained, and on what basis? How did one know who really belonged to the upper classes and who was masquerading through the masterful management of appearances? For newly rich women, in particular, striving to be identified as ladies, or members of the upper classes, the problem lay in how to successfully claim the status of lady, now that they could aspire to this status on the basis of their fathers’ and/or husbands’ wealth. The irony that newly rich social climbers who sought inclusion among elites were anxious about other climbers should not be lost on modern readers.

Potter exploited this sense of crisis: her services were in high demand, not simply because she was adept at dressing women’s hair in the elaborate styles of the day but, more important, because her exposure to elite ladies in New York, France, and England provided her with knowledge about ladyhood that newly rich Cincinnati women felt they needed. These women understood that money was not enough to define a woman as a lady because that status was based on the gentility and cultivation that money bought over generations, not in wealth per se. As Potter cautions, "Society is made up of varieties; but it is easy for the humblest servant to distinguish the well-born and highly-bred lady, under the plainest garb, from the parvenu woman, whose sudden good luck and well-filled purse dresses her in lace, seats her in a carriage, and places her in circles where she is more endured than courted. In Potter’s definitions of both the parvenu and the lady, appearances are secondary—ladylike behavior alone is the sign of a true lady." This is why A Hairdresser’s Experience concerns itself with exposing the uncouth manners of newly rich women—wanna-bees in today’s vernacular—with an extensive inventory of these women’s unladylike behaviors that include gossiping, bankrupting their husbands, and backstabbing other women in their scrambles for social status. When she published the shortcomings of such parvenu clients, Potter played to these women’s fears about their own status and, furthermore, did so in the guise of advising them how to become ladies.

Potter’s role as beauty expert—or, more precisely, as expert in elite femininity—in Cincinnati’s unstable social networks allowed her to deploy her marginality as outsider to create a somewhat subversive space for her to speak truth to power—a space in which she could discipline, and represent herself as disciplining, those who were her social superiors. In their quest for ladyhood, Potter’s hairdressing clients were willing to submit themselves to the hairdresser’s sharply worded opinions, and perhaps were even willing to endure her less than flattering representation of them, because she offered them breeding and status as ladies, despite the irony that on account of race Potter herself was, in theory, denied such femininity. In one particular instance Potter zealously claims her authority on ladyhood before her clients:

Laying down my work, I rose to my feet and said, Ladies, I can not tell you what I think constitutes a lady, and keep my seat. I must get up. I do not think all those are ladies who sit in high places, or those who drive around in fine carriages, but those only are worthy the name who can trace back their generations without stain, honest and respectable, that love and fear God, and treat all creatures as they merit, regardless of nations, stations, or wealth. These are what I say constitute a lady.

Potter does not tell her readers how her clients respond to this declaration of ladyhood; the implication is that they recognize and value her authority on what elite femininity or ladyhood looks like.

In view of the culture’s disavowal of black women’s femininity, Potter’s public refusal to adopt the required deferential mode of address in her narrative is remarkable. While many may have seen Potter as a drudge or mere servant to her female clients, it appears that her employers’ desire for the knowledge she had offset their differences from her. As both an outsider and an insider—a social outsider, yet a physical insider—Potter straddled an ambiguous and contradictory status that simultaneously identified her as a modern wageworker freed from older social hierarchies of deference, but also located her as a loyal domestic servant from the past who knows the family’s secrets (one reviewer invoked the metaphor of the valet to describe the basis of Potter’s expertise). Potter was able to exploit this social ambiguity and openly subscribe to norms of womanhood that the culture at large denied her: she could professionally represent ladyhood without having to be a lady herself (though she clearly had to be respectable). When she offers her services to her readers as a public good, Potter temporarily evades the culture’s tendencies to make black women visible in the culture either as hypersexual commodities or as brute labor.

This triangulated relationship between a black working woman, her elite female clients, and her Cincinnati readers illustrates how African American working women’s authorship offered an even more contradictory and paradoxical space for racial social legitimacy than we have yet recognized. When black women writers negotiated the constraints and opportunities associated with a racially polarized and male-led U.S. public sphere, they produced models of femininity, or femininities, that were multidimensional— in the words of scholar Nellie McKay, models that were not static, or a single ideal.¹² That is, they fashioned gendered models of authorship responsive to a wide range of audiences that exploited, even if in the end they could not overcome, the race and class differences that existed between themselves and white women: African American women, in other words, refused to inhabit any single model of black female authorship.

Potter’s rhetorical frankness before clients and readers offers us another perspective on her speaking out, however. If Potter—a black working woman excluded from ladyhood by virtue of her race and class—is telling white women what constitutes ladyhood, this disciplinary gesture is located firmly within a paradoxical loyalty to preindustrial elite status. Though she assumes a mode of social authority that subverts racial and class hierarchies, closer analysis reveals the basis of this authority in a contradictory, nostalgic allegiance to preindustrial social structures in which birth, or pedigree, combined with behavior to constitute elite ladyhood. This elite femininity, as one historian has claimed, wielded significant symbolic power in an unstable society: The female image seemed to disarm and dissolve the contentious differences in industrial America. She was without a class, without a party, and bespoke differences that could be ascribed to nature rather than politics or economics. Following this logic, Potter infers that the domestic bitterness and wretchedness that she witnessed in high life derives from modern women’s competitions for status.¹³

Like elites themselves, Potter the author clearly viewed women’s competitive behaviors through the lens of a middle- or upper-class fantasy that perceived the downside of commercial success as society’s fall from an imaginary Edenic model of social harmony into a state of social conflict. The disadvantage of a modern market ethos vested in competition and social mobility was that it threatened preindustrial and deferential social hierarchies, hierarchies in which people knew their place and stayed put. Hence, Potter establishes her authority as social critic by endorsing, rather than opposing, a social structure based on inequality, not equality. In this way, we might say that Potter paradoxically supports rather than subverts the racial and class status quo, even though as woman wageworker she participates in, and very much benefits from, a modernizing economy.

Despite Potter’s status as a servant-outsider who explicitly resisted the forms of deference the preindustrial elite ideal presupposed, her paradoxical adherence to preindustrial hierarchies illustrates how she shared important common ground with her white readers that we do not typically ascribe to black authors, whom we imagine as necessarily antagonistic to Anglo-American elites. Both the black hairdresser and her white readers alike are shocked at the behaviors they see in the newly minted high life—and this similarity in perspectives is of greater importance to her readers than her racial and class difference. Modern readers should see this dynamic as evidence that African American and Anglo-Americans participated in and cofabricated contradictory U.S. discourses about race and labor, despite African Americans’ awareness of their differing, often antagonistic, race and class interests. In addition, A Hairdresser’s Experience illustrates how scholarly formulations of black print culture as necessarily organized around black protest and resistance fail to capture the wide range of black writings from the period.¹⁴

While A Hairdresser’s Experience’s unusual focus on elite white women speaks to Potter’s implication in elite norms for nineteenth-century womanhood, the narrative also offers us an unorthodox perspective on the workings of slavery, abolition, racial identity, and racial solidarity: Potter’s wide exposure to white and black elites in different regions of the United States showed her that abolitionist accounts about life in the Deep South failed to depict important dimensions of the region’s peculiar institution, which she felt merited publicizing. Following her descriptions of the New York elite resort of Saratoga Springs, the second-longest travel chapter in A Hairdresser’s Experience, entitled Natchez—New Orleans, takes readers down the Mississippi to the Lower South, where Potter’s encounter with the sunny South transforms the travel narrative into a somewhat inadvertent antislavery tract, the inclusion of which potentially undermined her authority with Cincinnati’s antiabolitionist commercial elites.

Potter initially frames her travel to the south in conventional touristic terms. In classic travel mode, she speaks of being desirous of seeing the sunny South. . . . having heard so much of the beauties of the residences in the vicinity of Natchez, surpassing those of the English nobility, and feeling myself quite mean at having seen those of England before the beauties of my own country, I determined to see and judge for myself. In the northern imaginary of 1859, the Lower South, with its history of relatively recent Spanish and French colonization, was seen as an exotic region anomalous to the nationalist narrative of westward expansion that featured Ohio, Texas, and far western states, including California. As one of the country’s least Americanized regions, the Lower South, especially the Mississippi Delta cities of New Orleans and Natchez, would have held a certain allure to northern readers unfamiliar with the region and who were curious about it in the wake of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1853 abolitionist best seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This region would confound Potter’s cosmopolitan persona on account of two significant attributes: it was host to the nation’s most exploitative forms of plantation slavery and home to the largest population of wealthy, slaveholding blacks, a population with whom Potter had had very little experience, despite their shared African descent.

Potter makes it clear at the start that she was perfectly delighted both with the people and the scenery on her arrival in the Lower South,