Concepts53:59The Wonderful Henry Field Brown: From Fugitive Slave to Ingenious Entertainer
A gravestone sits in Toronto’s historic Necropolis Cemetery. Over a century outdated, the inscription reads: “Henry Brown, died June 15, 1897.”
Few might think about the dramatic life story behind this modest marker.
Brown’s first a long time are described in The Narrative of Henry Field Brown Written By Himself (1849).
Descended from Africans kidnapped and shipped to the American South, he was born in Virginia round 1815.
“I entered the world a slave — within the midst of a rustic whose most honoured writings declare that males have a proper to liberty,” Brown writes in his e book.
Henry Brown’s escape
In maturity, Brown is enslaved at a Richmond tobacco manufacturing unit.
One horrible day in 1848, he describes going to a close-by avenue, to see some 350 individuals in bondage, “marching below the course of a Methodist minister, by whom they had been bought, and amongst which slaves had been my spouse and kids.”
This private horror alters Henry Brown.
“I now started to get weary of my bonds; and earnestly panted after liberty,” he writes.
He’s praying at some point, “when the concept all of a sudden flashed throughout my thoughts of shutting myself up in a field, and getting myself conveyed as dry items to a free state.”
Brown pays two locals to assist nail him right into a slender picket postal crate, addressed to abolitionists in Philadelphia, who’re able to obtain him.
Transported by cart, steamship and practice, Brown’s field arrives within the metropolis after 27 hours — a few of which he has spent the wrong way up on his head, bearing his full physique weight.
However he arrives alive.
Brown’s narrative ends in triumph, with the singing of a hymn, because the abolitionists “managed to interrupt open the field, after which got here my resurrection from the grave of slavery.”
Turning into Henry Field Brown
The 1849 escape of Henry Brown has impressed visible artwork, efficiency, and artistic writing in our personal period, in addition to a rising physique of analysis.
However Brown himself was its first interpreter.
Including Field to his title, he joined different fugitive enslaved individuals, such because the eminent Frederick Douglass, in giving talks on the transatlantic abolitionist lecture circuit.
Audiences gathered to listen to these firsthand accounts, in an period when some didn’t have the complete image of slavery’s brutal realities. But the fugitive audio system remained at risk.
IDEAS spoke to Martha Cutter, writer of a 2022 e book, The Many Resurrections of Henry Field Brown, which options new analysis about his life.
She notes that “In the US, there have been many fugitive slave legal guidelines (that) made it authorized for any individual to attempt to take Field Brown or every other slave again to slavery, on very flimsy phrases. It is fairly clear that 1850 was a dicey time, a troublesome time, to be a free Black man.”
Henry Field Brown quickly made his approach to England, to one more sort of life.
Performing as Henry Field Brown
Slavery had been abolished in England in 1834, however there was public curiosity there in listening to formerly-enslaved audio system from America.
Nonetheless, white abolitionists — if not fellow audio system — started to query Henry Field Brown’s daring fashion of presentation, which included a assured narrative, and numerous visible props.
“If you did not sort of keep on with a reasonably strict script, the abolitionists weren’t keen on having you symbolize them…that script of the passive enslaved particular person,” stated Cutter.
Field Brown and the abolitionists parted methods early into his 25 years in England, so he took cost of his personal stage presentation. His instincts led him to turn into a multifaceted entertainer.
An commercial from 1864, included in Cutter’s e book, provides the flavour of his reveals:
“Professor Field Brown, from Africa and America, will seem because the Nice African Magician, wearing his Native Costume, additionally because the King of All Mesmerists.”
Brown’s Magic Act
Regardless of his adoption of personas, showy promotional stunts, and onstage illusions, Henry Field Brown’s political message in regards to the inhumanity of slavery and the wrongs of racism remained unchanged.
Cutter factors to the best way packing containers figured actually and symbolically in his magic act, as vessels of each loss of life and deliverance.
“There is a later efficiency in England the place he talks in regards to the Center Passage, the horrible voyage of the enslaved from elements of Africa. He…then he will get into his personal field as if to display he had a style of that Center Passage.”
In 1852, the performer took Thomas Brindley to courtroom. He was the writer of slur-laden newspaper overview that scoffed on the descriptions of slavery as exaggerated. Field Brown received the swimsuit.
There was additionally subversive political humour in Henry Field Brown’s act. He hypnotized viewers members to behave like cattle, which appeared amusing on the floor, however possible grew out of racist stereotypes of the enslaved as beasts.
Cutter factors out that Field Brown the mesmerist is “making white British people run round on stage, and gobble down uncooked cabbage. So he is clearly flipping the script. Sure, this was humorous, however it was additionally about taking management.”
Deciphering Henry Field Brown
Considered from the vantage level of our personal period, Cutter’s e book concludes that Henry Field Brown may be seen as “a dissident and rebel efficiency artist.”
Scholar Daphne Brooks, who wrote about Field Brown for her 2006 e book about acts of escape by the previously enslaved, Our bodies in Descent, agrees.
“There are all these ways in which we will take into consideration Field Brown: as efficiency artist, as visible artist, as public speaker, singer, writer,” stated Brooks.
“He had this limitless resourcefulness in the best way of inventive resistance that marks him as distinctive in a discipline of remarkable people who fought their very own trafficking.”
Henry Field Brown in Canada
Henry Field Brown finally returned to the US, greater than a decade after abolition in 1865. He introduced his second spouse and kids, who joined him onstage, and sang with him.
He made his dwelling base in Canada: briefly in London, Ont., after which settling in Toronto. It was right here, Cutter found, that he died and was buried in 1897.
Although Field Brown’s story is healthier identified within the U.S., there may be rising recognition and analysis into this final part of his life.
Three Toronto residents — historical past advocates Coralina Lemos, Adam Wynne, and Pancheta Barnett — just lately labored collectively to have a laneway named for him, behind a home he lived in on Shiny Avenue within the Corktown neighbourhood east of downtown.
Standing close to the signal marking Henry Field Brown Lane, Panceta Barnett says she is delighted to have realized about Henry Field Brown’s life, in all its tragedy and triumph.
“That is one thing that I feel is newsworthy,” Barnett stated.
“It is historic revelation. This isn’t a time for us to undergo life, not remembering these individuals.”
Obtain the IDEAS podcast to hearken to The Wonderful Lives of Henry Field Brown.
*This documentary was produced by Lisa Godfrey.
For extra tales in regards to the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success tales inside the Black group — take a look at Being Black in Canada, a CBC undertaking Black Canadians may be happy with.
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