Finding Doll in the Shoe Boots Archive
In such circumstances of archival absence and the abundance of violence that mediates our relationship with Doll, Saidiya Hartman methodology in “Venus in two Acts” warns against repeating the “founding violence” of slavery (Hartman 10). She writes, “This violence determines, regulates and organizes the kinds of statements that can be made about slavery and as well it creates subjects and objects of power. The archive yields no exhaustive account of the girl’s [Venus’s ] life, but catalogs the statements that licensed her death” (Hartman 33). Hartman, thus, engages with “critical fabulation” (Hartman 11) as a methodology that imagines and rethinks speculative possibilities of freedom to consciously “strain against” the limits of archival erasure. Instead of seeking redemption for those silenced by the archive, Hartman wishes to “paint a full picture of their lives” to broach the impossibility of envisioning freedom for enslaved subjects in the archive (ibid.).
In the case of Doll, her unknown origins signify that her presence in the Cherokee archives is premised on proprietary relations that became the basis upon which her claims to citizenship were challenged and advocated upon by the Cherokee National Government. This has particular relevance for the constitutionalization of citizenship for the Cherokee republic in the 1820 that was attempting to centralize its form of governance from a disparate system of towns to acquire more negotiating power with European colonists, who were unable to gauge decentralized forms of kinship and relation. Formed in the image of the United States government, the ratification of the Cherokee constitution in 1827 that was led by an elite group of free men, minimized the authority of Cherokee women and altered the terms of political discourse from “consensus” to “official processes of political discourse” (Miles 106). Adopting this form of legislative power would radically alter race relations within the Cherokee republic, evolving in a “paradoxical relationship between slavery and freedom, as well as between state formation and racial formation” (Miles 107-8). Put differently, the growth of a Cherokee nation through the juridico-political vocabulary of Western liberalism necessitated systems of subordination within the Cherokee government, which was evident in the the adoption of slavery, and gatekeeping the benefits of citizenship from members with AfroCherokee heritage. As Miles writes, “In tandem with this transformation, the Cherokee nation-state had begun the slow process of defining blacks as a separate, racial group with the codification of written laws. In the earliest Cherokee laws referring to Blacks, Black people were described in terms that recognize a connection between race (Blackness) and caste (enslaved status)” (Miles 110). It becomes apparent that race accrues new semantic value in Cherokee identity through the institutionalization of slavery that was occurring in concomitance with organization of slave labour in the American colonies. For the Cherokee Nation by the 1820s this meant that “Cherokee and black alliances” were limited by law with Cherokees of African descent being classified as non-citizens or second class citizens (Miles 114).
Returning to the Shoe Boots petition, Shoe Boots’s desire to set his children free legally becomes evident in his allegorization of biblical genealogies — “I think of them having bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh…” (Shoe Boots 1). Yet, it reflects his paradoxical investments in protecting them through citizenship as a father, and being the holder and keeper of property. More than a century after the passing of partus sequitir ventrum in colonial Virginia in 1662, Shoe Boots attempts at repairing the consequences of being born to an enslaved woman by challenging the inheritance of slavery with Cherokee citizenship. As the primary object of concern here is the division of Shoe Boots’s property, appealing with moral ones, reveals the contradictions in applying Euro-Western norms of property relations; he is torn between defining his relationship with Doll (who is also his property by the virtue of being enslaved), and the inheritance that he intends to secure for his children.
Shoe Boots describes the relationship with Doll as illicit, since he was “crost in [his] affection” and “debased [himself]” by having children with her (Shoe Boots 1). Put otherwise, the ambiguity and exploitation within their relationship, which will be misdirected by naming it as marriage or partnership, reveals the “convergence of terror and pleasure in the libidinal economy of slavery” (Hartman 1). The concerns of the erotics have to be forefronted in this petition as being constituted by the Cherokee nation’s conceptions of Blackness and enslavement being synonymous with each other. And yet, Shoe Boots engages with the ambiguity of these definitions to protect the future of his Black and Cherokee children.
The letter was originally written in English, and not Cherokee, supposedly by Shoe Boots’s White missionary blacksmith, William Thompson, who had moved to Hightower in 1822. Yet, Shoe Boots’s use of Thompson presents a crisis of authorship and voice in the letter. In fact, Miles suggests that the confessional form of the letter derives from Thompson’s Christian morality, at the same time it might have been strategically used by both Shoe Boots and Thompson in light of the Cherokee National Council’s antiblack stance (Miles 116). The details of the reception of the letter is detailed on the second page of the manuscript, where Major Ridge, the Speaker of the Council and a slaveowner, “grants freedom to the children”, but also orders Shoe Boots from “begetting any more children by the said slave woman” will require the approval of the national council (Shoe Boots, 2) . Other committee members have signed on the letter as of 1834 to certify that it is a legitimate copy of the original letter transcribed by William Thompson. In Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakhóta Oyáte (2019), Chris Pexa underlines that translation is not merely a model of communication, but a description of knowledge productions and community formations in places where translation crystallizes differences rather than sameness” (Pexa 10). By attending to the material history of the production and reception of this text, we become aware of the rhetorical and linguistic means by which Shoe Boots attempted to manipulate dominant conceptions of citizenship and property within a colonial framework to protect his children from a future of enslavement.
His efforts, of course, would pan out in an unexpected way with Doll being purchased by the Ridge family, his three older children were set free, leaving his two youngest children — Elizabeth and William — unprotected by the Council’s act of emancipation and citizenship. Doll was eventually freed in 1849 after the death of Susannah Ridge; she would move east to Delaware to live with her daughter, Elizabeth, near the West bank of Grand River. After the Cherokee slave revolt of 1842, Doll applied to the federal government for free land, which she believed she was entitled to, by the virtue of being married to Shoe Boots. Although the contemporary reference of marriage misleads the terms of Shoe Boots, and Doll’s relationship, it would become especially useful for William Shoe Boots, whose name would not be listed in the Dawes Rolls. Nevertheless Doll skillfully puts the erotic and social valences of it to use to negotiate material rights and benefits for herself and her children. According to Miles, Doll passed away in 1860 as a “free and propertied woman”, living as a “sister-outsider” of the Cherokee Nation in the District of Delaware, “linked by relationships, separated by race” (Miles 185).