The Circulatory Mobility of Henry Bibb: Gender and Border in Detroit Abolitionist Politics

This paper focuses on Henry Bibb and his circulatory movements and fluid subjective formation.  His nonlinear mobility can be seen in his autobiography which detailed his peculiar trajectory of escaping from slavery and also in the way he assisted fugitive slaves in the Detroit-Canada border area.  Bibb’s escape narrative recounted a cycle of escape, return, re-enslavement, and re-escape before his final arrival in Detroit.  Bibb’s return to Kentucky to rescue his wife departed from most contemporary slave narratives which drew a linear line from enslavement to freedom. This straight progression usually coincided with realization of American manhood without constructing a properly gendered husband subject. Bibb’s plot, by contrast, reconciled one’s urgent desire for liberty and one’s conformity to gender roles by retelling escape and return in one account. Such retelling enacted an American slave subject who possessed the right gender traits.   While working on his autobiography in Detroit, he also embarked on fugitive slave assistance, going back and forth across the Detroit River to boat escapees to the Canadian side.  During the boat ride, he would give a welcome speech to fugitive slaves “in behalf of the citizens of Canada.”  Such malleable subjectivity was attributable to the fluid nature of the Detroit border region that allowed easy transgression of national identities as well as to an abolitionist imperative to carve out a place for the self-emancipated in both Canada and the United States.  By examining Bibb’s circulatory movements, the paper argues that Bibb not only saw mobility as a political physical act but turned it into expressions of belonging intertwined with gender, national, and colonial meanings. Furthermore, his non-linear movements signaled the nonlinear nature of his relationship with freedom and the state, a condition necessitated by abolitionist exigencies and facilitated by the U.S.-Canada border culture.