In Willa Cather’s last novel, Sapphira and the Slave Girl, the circulation of property in various forms and its connection to people of differing statuses indicate an anthropological awareness of culture as a process that is constantly created and enacted rather than a linear progression of achievements. Within the novel, the discourse surrounding material culture orients itself toward white individuals in positions of power; however, examining the historical context and function of objects and household spaces fractures the dominance of the narrative’s white perspective and provides insight into the lives of its African American characters. Objects in Sapphira and the Slave Girl frequently undermine the idea of a static identity determined by race and social class, pointing instead to the possibility of adaptation and ultimately self-fashioning.

The novel’s evocation of place and culture has been noted by a number of reviewers and critics, but its economic underpinning has thus far gone unexamined. Within a capitalist society, material culture is virtually inextricable from the market economy, and the objects within Sapphira bristle with economic meaning. The novel’s enslaved characters interact with household objects while they are themselves legally owned objects who circulate as possessions within the lives of the novel’s white characters. Attending to the culture of Sapphira and the Slave Girl without examining the economic factors that undergird it risks flattening the lives of its enslaved characters and ignoring the regional, seemingly isolated locale of Back Creek’s connection to larger historical and economic crosscurrents. Both proslavery rhetoric in the late antebellum South in which the novel is set and the Lost Cause–inflected evocations of slavery that still dominated popular American discourse when the novel was written attempted to soften slavery’s atrocities and portray it as a system of benevolent care rather than economic exploitation. The ongoing scholarly work of Daina Ramey Berry, Thavolia Glymph, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, and Edward Baptist provides new ways of conceptualizing slavery and has been of incalculable influence to my thinking about Cather’s last novel.

The beginning of the novel piles up objects and routines that signal Sapphira’s gentility and differentiate her from the other white people in the region. Richard Millington’s remark that “Shadows on the Rock is the reverse of démeublé: it is a book full of things and the practices of everyday life” (para. 10) applies equally to Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Sapphira’s china is not just good; it is “surprisingly good to find on the table of a country miller in the Virginia backwoods” (7). Her speech and handwriting are “more cultivated than was common in this backcountry district” (19). Her coach with the “Dodderidge crest” (“that mysterious stamp of superiority”), silver coffee urn, English wallpaper, and worn Wilton carpet link her to an older and more stratified culture. These aspects of Sapphira’s lifestyle are equated with her English ancestry, distinguishing her from her husband, whose family are termed “immigrants” because they are from continental Europe. The ordinary white people of Back Creek judge Henry for his lack of a southern accent but accept the differences in Sapphira’s speech as the prerogative of someone they think of as “an heiress” (9).

As one who inherits objects, property, and people as well, Sapphira’s relative prosperity is evident. Her advantages, however, are not initially displayed as emerging from wealth but are explicitly connected to her social class and heredity. The ancestral origin of the luxury objects in Sapphira’s household places them outside of an economic framework. The “heavy Wilton carpet, figured with pink and green leaves,” has been “‘brought over’ by Sapphira’s mother” from England and contributes to the “settled comfort and stability” of the parlor (43). Sapphira’s parlor carpet, however, links her firmly to the decorating trends of the nascent American middle class. As Shirley Wajda points out, “By 1850 the nation’s carpet production had tripled, reducing prices, and the American middle class could enjoy in their parlors, dining rooms, and bedrooms a variety of carpets.” Wajda also notes that English carpets that had been “imported to the United States as early as 1790” from “carpetmaking centers such as Axminster and Wilton, remained prized possessions” (192). As this information indicates, Sapphira’s Wilton carpet might signal her social class, but it is also an example of a luxury object readily obtainable by anyone with sufficient money. The framing of the carpet as an ancestral object connected to Sapphira’s genteel background divorces it and the other household objects from nineteenth-century consumer culture. Richard Bushman comments on the symbiosis between luxury goods and the market economy: “Capitalism and gentility should have been enemies. But they were not. Capitalism and gentility were allies in forming the modern economy” (xvii).

At other points in the novel, however, Cather herself destabilizes the association of luxury goods with birth and ancestry. Sapphira’s silver coffee urn appears to separate her from the Bethel Church congregation and its “poor plate” just as her good china seemingly signals her family’s difference from the poor white Appalachian woman Mandy Ringer, who brings out her “blue chiney cups and plates” when Rachel visits (123). Mandy Ringer’s treasured but common china cups and plates (probably, according to Ann Romines’s note in the scholarly edition, Staffordshire transferware imported in mass quantities) likewise could be seen as differentiating her from the enslaved people to whose gourd dishes the novel refers (473n123). Cather, however, shows connections with particular domestic objects as economically and socially constructed rather than foreordained and inevitable. Rachel Blake, Sapphira’s daughter, displays her own knowledge of silver when she tells Mandy Ringer that the stolen Bethel communion service “aint silver at all. It’s plated stuff, and poor plate at that, I can tell you” (127). Rachel might eschew many of the values of the society within which she was raised and spent the first part of her adult life, but she maintains and deploys the knowledge her upbringing and experiences give her.

Mandy Ringer admires the knowledge and experience that allow Rachel to judge the quality of the Bethel communion service but attributes it to Rachel’s time in Washington rather than her upbringing in Sapphira’s quasi-aristocratic household, telling Rachel, “I wish I could a-had your chance, mam. It’s city life that learns you, an’ I’d a-loved it!” (128). Mrs. Ringer views Rachel’s discernment not as the inevitable product of ancestry but as learned skill derived from urban living, one that a mountain woman like herself could attain if she had the opportunity. Rachel herself learns fine cooking from Sarah, a “free mulatto woman from New Orleans” whom she meets in Washington (139). Sarah’s enslaver has freed her, and she supports herself in Washington by cooking food for dinner parties. Till acquires her domestic skills from the English housekeeper Mrs. Matchem, also unhinging vocation from ethnicity and cultural background. Again, we see Cather using a comparative, anthropological model of culture as shared behavior and knowledge.

Within the novel enslaved people are conspicuously absent from the culture of manufactured china and dishware. Cather instead elaborates on enslaved people’s use of gourds: “[T]hey were cut into dippers for drinking, and bowls for holding meal, butter, lard, gravy, or any tidbit that might be spirited away from the big kitchen to one of the cabins. Whatever was carried away in a gourd was not questioned. The gourd vessels were invisible to good manners” (24). This passage, which includes a description of the gourd vines twining around slave cabins, contributes to the novel’s pastoral tone and reinforces the myth of the plantation as a premodern, self-sufficient space divorced from the larger market economy. Through an examination of local merchants’ ledgers and objects unearthed during fieldwork, anthropologist Matthew Greer has uncovered evidence that enslaved people in the northern Shenandoah Valley did in fact participate in the culture of commercial dishware and tea drinking, purchasing tea and using china implements in its preparation and serving: “While enslaved Southerners certainly used these plants to make a variety of household items, the humble gourd was not the only container they owned. Rather, enslaved people purchased and used a wide range of ceramic vessels” (“Cather and Enslaved Life” 4).

The hilly Virginia landscape where the events of the novel play out is itself foregrounded as a possession whose ownership and use shift historically. Cather paradoxically provides readers with more detail about the mechanics of land transfer and ownership in her southern novel than she gives in either O Pioneers! or My Ántonia, her two frontier novels. Sapphira and Henry’s relationship is a cultural and religious fusion, with Henry as the descendant of dissenting working people and Sapphira connected to the landed aristocracy and the Church of England. Their disparate backgrounds come together seemingly harmoniously in the Mill House, built following their marriage in the settlement of Back Creek. The site of Sapphira and Henry’s home is a microcosm of European settlement and expansion. Despite the fact that it was ostensibly owned by Thomas, Lord Fairfax and deeded to Sapphira’s ancestor Nathaniel Dodderidge around 1647 (28), the land is named and delineated by its Indigenous inhabitants and not deemed safe for European relocation until 1759 (Cather 29). The English settlement of Back Creek begins with a colonial land grant, becomes a type of early frontier narrative, and is then connected to the American Revolution and independence from England. The Revolutionary-era origins of the gristmill that Henry eventually takes over are mentioned twice in the novel. Combined with the history of Sapphira’s and Henry’s European families and the elderly Jezebel’s African birth and experience of the Middle Passage, this brief narrative of the landscape of Back Creek gives the most complete account of origins and migration in any of Cather’s novels.

The Revolutionary-era mill becomes an Early Republic home when Sapphira and Henry create the Mill House. Cather notes that, because of its resemblance to Mount Vernon, the Mill House would be familiar to Virginians. Within the novel’s context, the explicit connection to Mount Vernon and George Washington presents a mythologized version of American respectability and even refinement. Bushman, however, calls such houses “one of the fixtures of the Southern landscape around 1850” and “the dwelling form most typical of middling farmers in the upland South” (396). He matter-of-factly designates I-houses like the Mill House to be regional “vernacular housing” divorced from the main architectural trends of the more fashionable North. Sapphira’s coach with its crest might well have seemed a discordant accompaniment to such a homespun house. The family portraits—of Sapphira and Henry—that so impress Nancy are also recent; they have been painted by a Cuban painter from Baltimore. Like the architecture of the house, they signify Sapphira and Henry’s self-conscious creation of their own American familial line in the Virginia backwoods.

I-houses in the mode of Mount Vernon might not have been the height of fashion throughout America in the nineteenth century, but during the 1930s, when Cather was thinking about her family’s past and writing Sapphira, such houses had gained a new vogue. Linked to the frequent colonial revivals in American design and no doubt influenced by the 1932 celebration of the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth, homes inspired by Mount Vernon appeared in multiple popular contexts. In 1937 Ladies’ Home Journal published both architectural and interior design plans for a Mount Vernon–inspired house. Catering to Americans of more modest means, both Sears and Aladdin marketed versions of their popular mail-order kit homes in the style of Mount Vernon. The Sears kit home takes a particularly broad view of Revolutionary War–era history by calling its Mount Vernon–inflected home “The Jefferson.” The actual Mount Vernon was at that time experiencing unprecedented popularity as a tourist attraction. Lydia Mattice Brandt writes that the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association “refused to endorse the widespread commercialization of the house and embarked upon an aggressive preservation and research campaign in an effort to maintain its hold on an ‘authentic’ vision of Washington’s home” (129). Contemporary American readers of Sapphira and the Slave Girl would have been nearly as familiar with the style of Mount Vernon and thus the novel’s version of the Mill House as nineteenth-century Virginians would have. Cather herself might have read about the extensive improvements being made to the house and its surrounding landscaping in a 1938 New York Times article intended to publicize the historic attraction (Brandt 153).

Fig. 1.1. The Mill House in Gore, Virginia. This photo was taken in April 1976 by Willa Cather’s niece, Ella Cather Lewis. During the period in which Sapphira and the Slave Girl is set, the house was owned by Jacob F. and Ruhamah Seibert, Willa Cather’s maternal great-grandparents and the prototypes for Henry and Sapphira. PHO-4-W689-1179. Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Collection, Willa Cather Foundation Collections and Archives, National Willa Cather Center, Red Cloud, Nebraska.

Unlike Till, who is never content in Back Creek, Sapphira does not directly criticize the Mill House or its rustic environment, but the novel offers some evidence that she is aware of her diminished status. When Henry states that he is the first miller who has made a living in Back Creek, she responds, “A poor one at that, we must own” (10). One of the novel’s many parenthetical asides reads as follows: “(Loudoun County people were thought to be a little jealous of the older and richer families in Tidewater Virginia)” (160). Frederick County, where Sapphira and Henry live, is of course poorer and more rural than Loudoun County and thus even more marginally placed within the dubious social hierarchy of antebellum Virginia. Sapphira displays her resentment of stereotypes about the supposedly backward upland South when she remarks to Henry’s nephew Martin, “Those folks from the Tidewater do hold their heads high, though I’ve never seen just why they feel called upon” (161).

Sapphira’s questioning of the status of Tidewater Virginians might seem like (and probably is) an instance of sour grapes; however, the novel itself constantly disrupts the supposed fixity of social and cultural categories. The person who misses the older and more refined world of Loudoun County most acutely is not Sapphira but Till, who feels entombed in the provincial world of Back Creek, separated from her family and friends at Chestnut Hill, and unable to use her more specialized domestic skills. She misses her old life in a personal way that differs from the stereotypes about enslaved people’s supposed loyalty to the master’s home. Till’s recollection of entering Winchester provides one of the novel’s longest and most aesthetically satisfying descriptions: “You drove into town by Water Street, lined on either side with neat mansard houses built of pale grey limestone; grey, but almost blue and not dressed so smooth as to take all the life out of the rugged stone. Such genteel houses they were [...] with green window shutters, and brass knockers; a little walled garden and a hydrant behind each house” (76). Focalizing a scene of urban life through the gaze of an enslaved woman is an extraordinary narrative choice for a white author in 1940 and illustrates Till’s cosmopolitan orientation.

By the novel’s postbellum epilogue, Till’s own relationship with household objects has paradoxically become more vexing. In “Nancy’s Return,” set twenty-five years after the main events of the novel, Till, now sixty-five, still lives in her old cabin and possesses what the child narrator of the epilogue calls “Till’s keepsakes and treasures”: “She had some of the miller’s books, the wooly green shawl he had worn as an overcoat, some of Miss Sapphy’s lace caps and fichus, and odd bits of finery such as velvet slippers with buckles. Her chief treasure was a brooch, set in pale gold, and under the crystal was a lock of Mr. Henry’s black hair and Miss Sapphy’s brown hair at the time of their marriage” (284). Till’s possession of these objects has been seen by recent critics as indicative of a nostalgia for the antebellum South. Valerie Rohy depicts Till as a curator intent on preserving material representations of her enslavers: “Caught up in history, Till preserves the artifacts of the Colberts’ lives, augmenting memory with metonymic objects that finally supplant the people they are meant to represent. . . . Preserving these objects, Till makes their past her own” (65). John Jacobs sees the brooch in particular as evidence that “Till keeps alive fond memories of plantation life” and that “her experience and imagination ... never extend beyond the boundaries of the plantation” (para. 7).

The epilogue’s narration might push us toward Till’s possession of these objects as a sign of nostalgia, but Till’s perspective is unrecorded. Till is obviously connected to and probably dependent on the descendants of the Colbert family. Thavolia Glymph says of the WPA interviews of enslaved people conducted in the 1930s, “The continued reliance of many black people on the ‘good will’ of southern whites did make some black people more cautious about criticizing a time still revered by southern white people” (15). How much more constrained might Till have felt in the late 1870s? Her stories are told while she is providing Sapphira’s descendants (presumably free) child care. The family stories and displays of objects entertain the epilogue’s narrator, an obviously demanding and probably somewhat spoiled child. Rather than “keepsakes and treasures,” these items might be viewed as material goods unconnected to their previous owners. As Greer’s research on tea ware illustrates, enslaved people in Webster County participated in mercantile culture and appreciated nonessential goods that beautified their lives and signaled refinement. Apart from Henry’s shawl, all of the things Till keeps indicate gentility and luxury. Her appreciation of the “lace caps and fichus” could be a result of their fine workmanship and beauty rather than their association with Sapphira, the woman who attempted to engineer the rape of Till’s daughter. Till’s dislike of Back Creek and her longing for the relative sophistication of Winchester is made clear earlier in the novel. These objects represent an environment more sophisticated than Back Creek and mean that she can own articles of fine apparel similar to those she cared for when enslaved.

Henry’s shawl, the one nonluxury item, is made of “fine Scotch wool” and is warm and practical. The Shenandoah Valley is relatively cool, and elderly people are often sensitive to the cold. In Cather’s short story “Old Mrs. Harris” (1932), Mrs. Harris has a “little comforter” that she wraps around her middle when she is chilly at night. This comforter is made from a discarded sweater “of very soft brushed wool” given to her by her neighbor, Mrs. Rosen, whose visiting nephew left it (80). No one reading “Old Mrs. Harris” would assume that Mrs. Harris’s cherishing of her “comforter” indicates devotion to Mrs. Rosen or her unnamed nephew. Regarding Till’s appreciation for Henry’s books, she is literate and in the course of her domestic work would have sometimes had the opportunity to snatch a few minutes to read. It is probable that she has also taught Nancy to read; Nancy’s solitary cleaning of the mill room would have given her access to the books Henry kept there. Till could well have wanted Henry’s books for the reason most of us want books—to read them.

As Till’s possession of his books and shawl illustrates, Henry Colbert is heavily implicated in the domestic world of the novel. Henry’s mill room, cared for by Nancy, is “all that was left of the original building which stood there in Revolutionary times. The old chimney was still sound, and the miller used the slate-paved fireplace in cold weather” (49). A remnant of the Revolutionary-era mill, this room is an appropriate setting for Henry, with his convoluted feelings about slavery. The copper pieces in Henry’s mill room come from his side of the family and, unlike most of the objects in the novel, are wholly unconnected to Sapphira. To Henry these copper tankards and bowls are both family heirlooms and signifiers of his and Nancy’s mutual devotion. When Nancy first puts flowers in the copper tankard, Henry tells her, “I like to see flowers in that stein. My father used to drink his malt out of it” (67). Due to the elements of familial disruption and overlap caused by slavery, these objects can be read in ways that undermine Henry’s own understanding of his family. If one of Henry’s brothers is indeed Nancy’s father, as Sapphira and others hint, then Nancy is Henry’s niece and has her own lineal connection to the copper objects from Flanders. Indeed, she is placing flowers in the tankard that belonged to her grandfather.

Domestic objects provide another means of understanding Nancy, who has often been read as a somewhat vague character—Toni Morrison terms her “pure to the point of vapidity” (19). Yet, Nancy is repeatedly able to thwart Martin’s attempts to rape her and ultimately proves able to leave all she knows for an unknown future in another country. How much of her seeming passivity is a role that Nancy must assume for her own safety? When Till suggests that Nancy offer a biscuit and eggnog to Sapphira in an attempt to regain her favor, she enjoins her to “smile, an’ look happy to serve her” (46). Till knows the control Sapphira has over her child and wants Nancy to regain her enslaver’s favor. Crucially, she tells Nancy to dissemble, encouraging her to hide her true feelings and perform the role of an enslaved person happy to serve, hoping that if Nancy plays her role properly, Sapphira will in response resume the part of benevolent mistress. Till’s instructions to Nancy underline the opacity of her own thoughts and motivations, hinting at aspects of her character that are not only unavailable to the reader from the novel’s narration but that would have been closed off to Cather as a white author.

Nancy’s interactions with household objects initially illustrate the demeaning and frightening circumstances of her life within the Colbert household. In an early scene, Nancy is pressing one of Sapphira’s caps with a “tiny iron” (20). She tells Rachel Blake that it is a “lil’ child’s iron” that she “coaxed” from “Miss Sadie Garrett” (20), presumably a local white child. The child-sized iron’s presence in the text introduces the world of childhood material culture, nascent in the mid-nineteenth century but omnipresent by the novel’s publication in 1940. The image of a young woman, barely out of childhood herself and denied childhood innocence due to enslavement, using a child’s toy to do adult work is disturbing. With its transference from a white girl to a Black girl (who must call the younger child “Miss”), the iron as signifier shifts from a toy to a tool. On one level this object represents Nancy’s unpaid labor and exploitation, yet her acquisition and skillful use of the small iron also indicate her exercise of agency within the limiting world of slavery.

The wooden hairbrush Sapphira uses to abuse Nancy is another feminine implement that haunts this scene. The ownership of a hairbrush further signals Sapphira’s connections to the wider world of fashion. Linda Young notes that “[t]he modern style of hairbrush was an innovation of the early nineteenth century, appearing in growing numbers on richer women’s dressing tables from the 1830s; until then, combs had been the standard hairdressing device for all classes” (104–5). Nineteenth-century women washed their hair infrequently, and prolonged brushing was needed to exfoliate the scalp and distribute its oils throughout the hair. Hair brushing was often a communal occupation practiced reciprocally by female relatives and friends and as a chore by servants and enslaved women. While Nancy is ironing, Rachel notices the brush’s imprint on her arm, evidence of her mother’s recent abuse of the enslaved girl. The hairbrush’s shift from grooming tool to implement of punishment seems to transform a tableau of female intimacy into a grotesque spectacle. Read within the historical framework of slavery, however, there is no transformation: intimacy and violence exist in tandem. The hairbrush’s use as a weapon merely illuminates the existing power differences between the two women, showing the exploitation at the heart of their relationship.

The reader never sees the actual hairbrush or witnesses the abuse: our perspective comes initially via Rachel, who from behind her mother’s closed door hears both Sapphira’s chastisement of Nancy for her supposedly clumsy hairdressing and the “smacking sound[s]” of an object repeatedly hitting flesh (16). To Rachel, her mother’s hair appears flawless; the novel describes the complexities of Sapphira’s hairstyle, indicating Nancy’s skill as a hairdresser. The physical results of the punishment are noted later as a parenthetical aside, as Rachel watches Nancy iron and wonders what the young woman thinks about Sapphira’s withdrawal of her favor. The text notes that “(the red marks of the hairbrush were still on the girl’s right arm)” (22). Cather uses parentheses elsewhere in the novel to provide commentary disguised as seemingly objective, factual observations. Her delineation of the abuses of slavery enters this catalog of historical and contextual details.

The red marks on Nancy’s arm gain added significance by their juxtaposition with the iron she is using. Irons can also leave marks—on both fabric and flesh. A red mark on the arm of a person who is ironing brings into the reader’s mind a burn with an iron. According to Jacqueline Jones, “When punishing slave women for minor offenses, mistresses were likely to strike with any weapon available—knitting needles, tongs, a fork or butcher knife, an ironing board or a pan of boiling water. In the heat of the moment, white women devised barbaric forms of punishment that resulted in the mutilation or permanent scarring of their female servants” (23). Sapphira could have used the child-sized iron to burn Nancy if Nancy had shown what Sapphira considered clumsiness at that domestic task. Within the system of slavery such violence was viewed by the majority of white people as necessary discipline. Jones partially attributes slave mistresses’ cruelty to their own status as victims within the patriarchal slave-ocracy, writing that “white women’s anxieties frequently spilled over into acts of violence” (23). Recent work by Glymph and Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers undercuts this perspective by showing the ways in which white women dispassionately used the institution of slavery to secure their own economic independence from their male relatives. Jones-Rogers’s research shows slave-owning women’s brutal acts of punishment as consciously deployed tactics aimed at labor management rather than Freudian projection. Sapphira’s own annoyance at Rachel’s disapproval of her “correcting” of Nancy follows Jones-Rogers’s thesis. Frustrated with her daughter, Sapphira thinks, “Never having owned any servants herself, Rachel didn’t at all know how to deal with them” (18).

Despite her relative narrative passivity, Nancy’s role as a subject within the action of the modern novel at times obscures her significance as an object within its historical setting. Before Sapphira turns against her, Nancy’s status within the novel is initially very similar to that of Eliza at the beginning of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe describes “that peculiar air of refinement, that softness of voice and manner, which in many cases seems to be a particular gift to the quadroon and mulatto woman” (17). Nancy “had a natural delicacy of feeling,” but she also has “Till’s good manners—with something warmer and more alive” (45). Eliza displays greater personality and agency than Nancy; however, Cather crucially frames Nancy as an individual, departing from Stowe’s classification of Eliza as a representative type of “quadroon” or “mulatto” woman. Initially, Sapphira’s preference for Nancy reflects Mrs. Shelby’s relationship with Eliza. Sapphira likes her “pretty face” (22) and enjoys having her as a companion. Left unspoken is the fact that possessing such an attractive and valuable slave would have given Sapphira status and indicated her wealth. This partially explains why she “liked to have her in attendance when she had guests or drove abroad” (22) and why, despite her hostility to Nancy, she takes the young woman on her annual visit to Winchester.

Nancy’s own consideration of domestic objects within the novel allows her to express herself aesthetically, as she does when she arranges the flowers in Henry’s copper tankard, and enables her to imagine herself as connected to the world beyond the Mill House. The portraits of Henry and Sapphira that hang in the parlor hold a particular fascination for her. Nancy’s contested parenthood connects her to the family portraits in multiple ways. Meant to signal the Colberts’ gentility and the stability of their family, the portraits have a different meaning to Nancy. If, as she hopes, the Cuban painter from Baltimore is her father, then she is the daughter of the artist who painted the portraits and is thus linked by parenthood to a space outside the United States, albeit one where slavery would remain legal until 1886. If one of the Colbert men is her father, then she is linked by genetics to the portrait of Henry and by marriage to the one of Sapphira and is thus as close in kinship to either as Martin is. Her wish that the Cuban painter is her father adds to Nancy’s individuality and shows her desire and ability to construct her own identity apart from her role in Sapphira’s household, foreshadowing her eventual escape from Back Creek and the new life she forges for herself in Montreal.

The portraits and their origin unsettle Henry as well. Sapphira taunts him about possessing “a kind of family feeling about Nancy,” alluding to the possibility that one of his brothers is the young woman’s father. Henry emphatically denies it, stating, “You know well enough, Sapphira, it was that painter from Baltimore,” to which Sapphira replies, “Perhaps. We got the portraits out of him anyway, and maybe we got a smart yellow girl into the bargain” (12). Nancy, as a light-skinned, straight-haired woman of mixed race, would have had greater value within the antebellum slave economy than an enslaved woman with a darker complexion. Sapphira’s designation of her as a “smart yellow girl” shows her awareness of this phenomenon. Biracial or “mulatta” women such as Nancy were highly sought after on the antebellum slave market. Edward Baptist notes, “Starting in the 1830s the term ‘fancy girl’ or ‘maid’ began to appear in the interstate slave trade. It meant a young woman, usually light-skinned, sold at a high price explicitly linked to her sexual availability and attractiveness” (240).

Although Nancy’s attractiveness is remarked upon early in the novel, she is not initially framed as an object of white male desire. Characters in the world of the novel would, however, have understood, and in Till’s case feared, the market value of her beauty. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs writes, “If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave” (36). Jacobs’s own heroic attempts to guard herself from being raped by her enslaver find a parallel in the stratagems Nancy uses to elude Martin’s pursuit. Henry himself explicitly considers Nancy within a marketplace where light-skinned enslaved women are trafficked sexually. When Rachel is asking him for the money to help Nancy escape, he expresses skepticism about Nancy’s ability to survive in Montreal: “A pretty girl like her, she’d be enticed into one of them houses like as not” (223).

Were Martin to succeed in his plan to rape Nancy and impregnate her, any children she had would be designated “quadroons” and add value to Sapphira’s estate. There is a very real possibility that Sapphira would at least attempt to sell Nancy’s children. During the breakfast conversation in which Henry refuses to put his name to Nancy’s deed of sale, he tells Sapphira, “You know we never sell our people,” and Sapphira replies, “Of course we don’t sell our people. [...] Certainly we would never offer any for sale. But to oblige friends is a different matter” (10). Yet Sapphira as a young woman managing her invalid father’s estate has certainly sold enslaved people and separated families: “When the increase of the flocks or the stables was to be sold, she attended to it with Henry’s aid. When the increase of the slave cabins was larger than needed for field and house service, she sold off some of the younger negroes” (27). Cather with this passage creates a terrible parallel between the offspring or “increase” of sheep and horses and enslaved children. Henry helps Sapphira sell livestock, but she competently sells off enslaved people herself. This fact aligns with Jones-Rogers’s research on the active part many white women took within the economic and financial dimensions of slavery. Like Cather’s parenthetical asides, the novel’s historical commentary provides additional information that sometimes undercuts the rhetorical world the white characters create.

The shifting temporal and regional economics of slavery also affect Till’s market value as both a mother and a worker. Daina Ramey Berry discusses enslaved women’s identification in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as “breeders,” demonstrated by having borne a child, as distinct from the forced procreation of the late antebellum period (19–21). In a locale where many laborers were not needed, an enslaved woman’s reproduction could be undesirable: “[e]nslaved women in the middle colonies as well as the North were often advertised for sale or exchange due to breeding” (20). Although the birth of children might enrich enslavers, sometimes, as with Till, an enslaved woman’s pregnancy and breastfeeding, as well as her attachment to her child, proved to be an inconvenience to her enslavers. Lizzie, the cook, cruelly tells Nancy about her mother’s forced marriage to the man she considers her father, who is impotent: “Miss Sapphy didn’t want a lady’s maid to be ‘havin’ chillum all over de place,—always a-carryin’ or a-nussin’ ’em’” (45). To Sapphira, Till’s value as a parlor maid who is “presentable and trim of figure” (74) is more important than any reproductive value she possesses. Despite her desire for Till to remain childless, Sapphira’s chuckling over “getting a smart yellow girl in the bargain” with the paintings indicates that she thinks of Nancy as an object of intrinsic value, like the portraits. Till herself is a victim of the slave market, forced to leave Chestnut Hill when she is fifteen because “Sapphira Colbert made a trade for her” (73). Again, Sapphira’s bargaining for Till underscores Jones-Rogers’s assertions about white women’s involvement in the slave trade.

Nancy’s and Till’s respective market values are also strongly connected to their domestic skills. According to Berry, “Enslavers who noted women’s skills identified five types of female workers: house servants, field hands, cooks, laundresses, and seamstresses. Only 5 percent of female laborers displayed evidence of work specialization” (18). Nancy exhibits skill in housekeeping, hairdressing, laundry, and needlework, indicating her mastery of a wide range of valuable skills. Ann Romines has written at length about Till’s domestic accomplishments and her transference of those skills to Nancy: “later, when Nancy is thrown back on her survival skills as a fugitive in Montreal, her housekeeping accomplishments become a valuable commodity on which she founds her new life as a free woman—thanks, at least partially, to her mother, Till” (217). As Nancy and Rachel prepare to depart Back Creek, Rachel notices that she has brought “one of the old reticules” and says that it will be useful for carrying the letters of support and introduction she will need (227). Indeed, Sapphira has used just such a reticule to carry to Mrs. Bywaters at the post office the note of invitation to Martin. Nancy, however, has brought the reticule for a different purpose entirely; it contains stockings that Sapphira has told her to darn—domestic work left undone that she feels compelled to finish. For Rachel the reticule is indicative of travel, possibility, and legitimacy. For Nancy it means none of those things; it is simply a container that holds work she must do and a symbol of her current life as an enslaved woman obligated to serve Sapphira. Nancy’s difficulty in imagining a different life for herself does not foreclose the possibility, as her return as a sophisticated and cosmopolitan woman at the end of the novel illustrates.

Within the world of the novel, Nancy might have taken the reticule inadvertently, but the historical record shows that enslaved people frequently and deliberately absconded with their enslavers’ possessions. According to Greer, “An examination of a recent compiling of runaway slave advertisements from twenty-five Mississippi newspapers identified a cohort of 225 individual escapees who equipped themselves with physical objects in order to aid their efforts” (“Bundles” 88). Greer identifies “the display of fine clothing and jewelry to enter into new social networks” as one use of these objects (88). The reticule, like Nancy herself, gains additional meaning and nuance outside the frame of the novel. Rachel herself understands the power of material goods as a form of self-expression and uses them to aid Nancy in her escape. As they flee Back Creek, Rachel gives Nancy her carpetbag and tells her, “From now on we must look spruce, like we was going visiting. I’m glad you’ve got a feather in your hat. It’s real becoming to you” (227). The hat Nancy wears to escape is “an old black turban of Mrs. Colbert’s” (227).

When she returns to Back Creek twenty-five years later, Nancy is also wearing a turban (276), but this time it is not the castoff of a white enslaver but part of a carefully considered outfit. The child narrator views Nancy’s distinctive fur-lined coat with suspicion: “We had no coats like that on Back Creek” (276). Because it is outside the boundaries of the antebellum South, Nancy’s clothing at the end of the novel indicates self-possession and transformation, contrasting with the objects belonging to the Mill House that persist in the novel into the epilogue. The objects in the earlier portion of Sapphira and the Slave Girl are more ambiguous, yet they also disrupt the novel’s white perspective and turn our attention to the extraordinarily complex and rich lives of the real enslaved people whose indefinable presence shimmers at the edges of the narrative.

Works Cited