I Need Help

There won't be a hair left on my head (or an unfrayed nerve in it) if I can't figure this out:

In which famous slave-narrative is a fugitive slave passing as a white woman discovered by dint of the calluses on her hands? 

I've looked through my collections of slave-narratives and scoured Google Books, Project Gutenberg, JSTOR, &c. and turned up nothing.  As you might imagine, the reference links to recent talk of heredity and fingerprints:

1. Did people believe calluses, or the propensity for developing useful ones, a  heritable trait?
2. Did they, following Galton, think fingerprints could be "obliterated" by calluses?

The forgotten slave-narrative connects these questions to larger issues of race and passing in Pudd'nhead Wilson.  It's been the linchpin of this section of the Twain chapter since I first outlined it.  Only now I can't remember which one it is and will no doubt deprive myself of sleep until I do. 

For The Record: I normally resist the urge to ask for help by soldiering through deep waters alone.  But I'm so frustrated now I can't even keep my metaphors strait.  Or my homonyms.  Plus my mistakes all reference drowning.  It's not like last Tuesday when I spent four hours utterly incapable of remembering anything about Randolph Bourne except he was disabled and died young.  That passed.  This won't. 

Comments

[JPool]

I don't know the slave narrative to which you're referring, and indeed was unaware of one in which the protagonist tries to pass for white. Surely, however, the calluses thing has nothing to do with race in a supposedly biological sense and everything to do with race in a social sense: a Southern white woman presumably would never engage in the sort of labor that would prduce calluses on her hands, where an enslaved woman would as a matter of course. I don't understand where fingerprints come into it, but I have the general feeling that I'm missing something here.

[John Emerson]

Gustavus Vasa is my favorite slave author, due to his later founding of a Swedish dynasty.

[susie]

Sorry, no help here. "Desiree's Baby" hinges on the discovery of "black blood" through supposedly distinctive marks on the fingernails of the baby (a common folk saying, as I'm sure you already know), and I think in _The House Behind the Cedars_ she refuses to pass for white and outs herself. Maybe one of Frances Harper's novels? I don't remember anything of the sort in Harriet Jacobs's _Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl._ (Although ... I do remember something about her dressing as a "Spanish" youth and almost getting caught because she was so pretty. Or am I totally making that up?)

Is there maybe a story of Harriet Tubman that you're referencing here? She often cross-dressed to escape detection.

Any other details or time period stuff we could go on?

[hermit greg]

My Southern Home (Chapter 10) tells the story of Lola Phelps, who was married to the white Mr. Phelps who had no idea she was owned by a Mr. Walker. There is no mention of calluses, though. The story could be somewhere there, perhaps?

[Jonathan Dresner]

My mind immediately went to Sherlock Holmes, but as far as I know "Red Haired Men" was the only one that turned on calluses and race didn't play much of a role at all....

I agree with Scott that the discussion of heredity and fingerprints is odd, in context, and with JPool that it's probably a mistake. I can't find anything in Ebsco, either.

Can you give us the reference you're following up on?

[sharon]

What's the date of the narrative? The science of fingerprints must have been pretty novel at the time (the first successful prosecution based on fingerprints in England wasn't until 1902, apparently - I think the very first was actually in India a few years earlier than that?), so it wouldn't be surprising if late 19th-century writers had some odd ideas about it.

[tayari]

Are you looking for fiction or non-fiction here? This is not the answer, but this is one of my favorites.. The story of William and Ellen Craft. She disguises as a white lad, and pretends that her husband is her slave.

[ceresina]

Yes, please update us, because I would've read it the way JPool suggested, as an indication of the work done & therefore class. (For example, I'm pretty sure Rhett Butler figures out Scarlett O'Hara's when she's wearing the drapes-dress *because* of the calluses on her hands.)

[Miriam]

Yeah, dates would help.

Not necessarily an American slave narrative?

[SEK]

First, I'd like to thank everyone for the help. If nothing else, I don't feel bone stupid anymore. (As I would've if it'd been in, say, Frederick Douglas.)

JPool:

I don't know the slave narrative to which you're referring, and indeed was unaware of one in which the protagonist tries to pass for white. Surely, however, the calluses thing has nothing to do with race in a supposedly biological sense and everything to do with race in a social sense: a Southern white woman presumably would never engage in the sort of labor that would prduce calluses on her hands, where an enslaved woman would as a matter of course. I don't understand where fingerprints come into it, but I have the general feeling that I'm missing something here.

Passing for white was a common way for "high yellow" blacks to make it North once they struck territory where they wouldn't know anyone. And yes, you're right that there's a social element: an upper-class woman wouldn't have callused hands. This would be a good time to quote the relevant (and rough) passages from the chapter:

[Galton] begins “Race and Class” with a simple, direct statement of observed fact: “There is no particular pattern that is special to any one [people], which when met with enables to assert, or even to suspect, the nationality of the person on whom it appeared” (193). Yet three pages later he notes “the general clumsiness of [Negroes’] fingers,” although he admits this observation may “be from pure on my part.” Nevertheless, he concludes by stating that the “width of the ridges seems more uniform, their intervals more regular, and their courses more parallel than with us. In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity, due to causes that I have not yet succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement” (196). The final admission of ignorance underscores the problem with his approach: he actively seeks evidence to confirm his belief that “the general aspect of the Negro print” accords with his impression of the general aspect of the Negro (196). Despite finding no discernible difference between the prints of one race or another, he insists his inability to find measurable distinctions in the manner of the folds and creases of the fingers and hands is a product of his own shortcomings. Without meaning to, Galton advocates a form of palmistry here, one bound to the future of the race instead of the individual. His argument is specious, but its appeal to Galton’s own authority as an expert in the subject of print analysis is powerful. Even those reviewers who thought he “devotes his life to the elucidation of the queer and the curious” and is “carried away by his enthusiasms” remind readers of Galton’s status as “an expert having uncommon powers of observation” (“Mr. Galton on Finger Prints” 19). To readers unfamiliar with the array of statistical evidence Galton presents, his hunches about the racial typology visible to (if not measurable by) his expert eyes carry the weight of fact. Race is only the first of two forces countering the radical individuality of human fingerprints. The other would be class.

Galton’s list of forces working to alter or obliterate fingerprints is not discussed in the chapter on “Race and Class,” as might be expected, but in an earlier chapter on “The Ridges and Their Uses.” He notes that they are “but faintly developed in the hands of ladies, rendered delicate by the continual use of gloves and lack of manual labour, and in idiots of the lowest type who are incapable of labouring at all.” They are destroyed “by the callosities formed on the hands of labourers and artisans in many trades, by the constant pressures of their peculiar tools.” Injuries leaving permanent scars obscure the ridges, and if “a piece of flesh is sliced off, or if an ulcer has eaten so deeply as to obliterate the perspiratory glands, a white cicatrix, without pores or ridges, is the result” (59). Much as he would like to convince himself otherwise, they do not, as he claimed, “have the unique merit of retaining all their peculiarities unchanged throughout life” (2). By his own admission, they can be destroyed through normal circumstance: a life of labor or a household accident can alter the immutable. Galton would insist that he speaks of the pattern of the print, a pattern which “grows simultaneously with its fatness, leanness, usage, gouty deformation, or age” and that while “as a whole [it] may become considerably altered in length or breadth, the number of ridges, their embranchments, and other minutiae remain unchanged” (98). He compares the print to a piece of lace which may be grossly stretched or shrunk, but never does he consider that it may be torn.

Where I'm headed with this, then, is the conflict caused by his implicit, because unprovable, racial essentialism and its effect on Twain's narrative.

Susie:

Any other details or time period stuff we could go on?

In my mind, she's caught on the road by slavers looking for someone else. I'm pretty sure it's pre-Civil War, but that it remained popular afterwards. (I don't have Twain's letters anymore, hate the person who recalled them and the fact that they're not all online yet.) The narrative itself doesn't have anything to do with fingerprints, it's just the connection I want to draw between race/class in the Twain.

Greg:

The story could be somewhere there, perhaps?

I went through my Brown and didn't see it there. (I distinctly remember marking the passage somehow or another. Ugh, but do I hate myself and my faulty memory sometime. I was up most of the night spinning my wheels on this one. But I can't find the book, file, or my notes, yet I know it's out there somewhere.)

EDIT: As I said, very tired and didn't refresh before commenting, so I didn't see the other comments. More after napping. (And let me reiterate my thanks to all who've tried to help rectify my mortifying stupidity.)

[The Constructivist]

You sure it was a slave narrative and not a novel by Stowe or Delany or Wilson or Brown?