Mutual Aid in Early America: A Roundtable
This roundtable includes reflections from four scholars who presented on a panel, “Mutual Aid in Early America” at the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) Biannual Meeting in June 2023, chaired by Liz Polcha. In this roundtable for Insurrect!, the panelists reflect on their own presentations as well as the conversation that ensued. Teachers and writers have a different orientation to mutual aid than organizers, but as several of the authors in this roundtable point out, that does not mean that mutual aid isn’t on our minds in our pedagogy and research. What we offer here is a larger reflection on a question that Kimberly Takahata poses below: how can we support and engage in mutual aid without placing our own demands upon it? Further, each author offers a list of suggested resources for further reading (thanks to Eagan for this idea!)
Eagan Dean
In reflecting on mutual aid in early America, I turned to work from my dissertation on intellectual mutual aid in Black women’s literary societies, particularly the Female Literary Association (FLA), sometimes also styled as a “society” of 1830s Philadelphia. This Association is mostly known for its publications in The Liberator as reported by Elizabeth McHenry and Marie Lindhorst. I have been following their trail through Philadelphia-area archives this past year. Through this research, I have come to conceive of this society as promoting a type of intellectual mutual aid that created space for literary self-construction, especially of gender.
Usually, we think of mutual aid in material terms; that is, we think of mutual aid as offering goods, funds, services, housing, or something tangible that can help a community survive and thrive. I certainly see the FLA as a descendent of eighteenth and nineteenth century Black benevolent associations for material mutual aid, such as those formed in 1793 by Black Philadelphians which Britt Rusert draws on in her contribution to the roundtable. The FLA worked in a distinct but related way by creating and distributing types of intellectual mutual aid that helped these free and freed Black women contend with the psychological and social harms of enslavement and anti-Blackness. This mutual aid developed through activities like reading together, workshopping writing, and engaging in public and private debate. This intellectual aid, beyond helping these writers make new space for Black women as thinkers, also helped them imagine womanhood differently. Caught between the violent, ungendering regime of enslavement on the one hand and the constricting norms of domestic white femininity on the other, these Black writers sought forms of gender expression that could be liberating. I argue that women’s literary societies rendered mutual intellectual aid in defining new types of womanhood that served Black women’s needs. I see this happening not only implicitly through the ways members expressed themselves, but also explicitly through the ways they talk about Black and white women, as in one writer’s story “A Mother’s Love.” They elevate qualities like physical modesty and mercy, as well as less traditionally feminine traits like civic responsibility, political conviction, and rhetorical skills. Approaching this research from my perspective as a trans studies scholar, I see the work of the Association, which advocates for gender transformation as a route to liberation, as a form of gender theory, which should actually be central to U.S. narratives of early trans history––in part as a corrective to the dominance of white transmasculinity in such histories.
I was fortunate to share this work with the mutual aid panel at SEA, whose work on mutual aid in American history troubles these intellectual/material lines and looks for deeper historical understandings of mutual aid impacts. Ittai Orr’s presentation on “Three Fingered Jack” and his maroon commune spoke to both historical mutual aid and the ways that popular storytelling muddled the radical possibilities of such histories. Orr highlighted the fact that European colonizer interpretations of this figure dominate the record through their claims to print legibility and reproducibility. I found Orr’s conclusions resonant with my own work, as the FLA’s key internal records have yet to surface in archives and may not in fact still exist. As Joanna Brooks has taught us, structures of racial power, especially anti-Black racism, shape archival preservation and loss. What is missing matters, and Orr’s attention to this issue of the non-preservation of mutual aid histories was generative for all of our work.
The conversation following the papers focused on teaching strategies that encourage mutual aid, from classroom democracy to expanding the definition of group work. What struck me most about this panel was its own modeling of intellectual mutual aid. As an immunocompromised person, being offered the option to present remotely demonstrated the kind of community care that our historical subjects modeled. Even more, though, the audience’s participation in our Q&A-turned-pedagogical-strategy-sharing session demonstrated the ways that intellectual mutual aid can work in the academy. One common theme in our teaching conversation was concern about balancing the power of the instructor with a desire for mutuality in the classroom. That leaves me with one final question, inspired by my historical interlocutors in the FLA as much as those I met at the SEA: how does mutual aid negotiate with structures of power? What new ways of imagining ourselves and our roles (especially our positionality with and within power) might better serve our efforts to aid each other?
Suggested Resources:
Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Rediscovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Duke University Press, 2002.
Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing For A Socially Just Future. Parlor Press LLC, 2015.
Ittai Orr
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and the marked increase of climate-change-related displacement of recent years, institutions that many expected or hoped would aid and protect American subaltern or oppressed/othered classes have undeniably faltered. As a result, it seems, mutual aid emerged as a useful term to describe the kind of ad-hoc activity that could take up the slack. But as Dean Spade has argued, mutual aid can be so much more than charity. The infamous FBI director J. Edgar Hoover apparently found The Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program especially threatening, and as viewers of the Netflix documentary Crip Camp know, their provision of food and supplies for the disability rights movement’s 1977 Section 504 sit-in led to a powerful victory against discrimination.
Stories that come to us from the eighteenth century Atlantic world speak to a similarly radical legacy, even if many early instances of mutual aid were as seemingly mundane as a group of tradesmen pooling their wages for an emergency relief fund. Those who found themselves entirely without a state in the rugged interior of Jamaica after escaping from the plantations on which they were enslaved had to build new affiliations and institutions from the ground up, not only ensuring the survival of the most vulnerable, including people with disabilities, but lofting them into important leadership roles. My contribution to the roundtable at the Society for Early Americanists in June 2023 specifically focused on the figure of Captain Cudjoe, the elected leader of one of these ad-hoc “maroon” societies, and the far-reaching implications of his potential disability. Cudjoe was described by historian of the Maroon Wars, Robert C. Dallas, in 1803 as “bold, skillful and enterprising” but also as “a short man, uncommonly stout,” with “a very large lump of flesh upon his back, which was partly covered by the tattered remains of an old blue coat, of which the skirts and sleeves below the elbows were wanting.” What if we take these strange details seriously? They raise the tantalizing possibility that maroon society was strikingly radical in its attitudes toward what were often disqualifying physical “deformities.”
The 1800 novel, Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack, by William Earle Jr. seems to confirm the association between maroons and unexpected physical difference: Earle draws on eye-witness accounts to write that enslaved men and women who suffered from the disfiguring disease yaws were sent away from the plantation to become “deserted negroes.” He speculates that due to their occult practices of Obeah, a creole religion rooted in African beliefs, some miraculously managed to survive and form communities wherein “the more they are deformed, the more they are venerated, and their charm credited as strongest.” These rumors, however sensational, suggest that British authors like Earle gleaned the possibility of a much less brutal alternative world. Many maroons must have been disabled by yaws – if they had not already been injured in the incredibly dangerous labor of sugar production – but contrary to the expected outcome of their banishment to the jungle (their deaths), they thrived in communities of care that enabled their survival.
This tendency toward acceptance and care––features of what we might call an informal mutual aid society––undoubtedly contributed to maroon success against the British: it was under Cudjoe’s leadership, after all, that the Leeward Maroons forced the British to formally recognize their independence forty years before the American Revolution. Mutual aid provided a strength denied to those laboring under the divisive calculus of the market: survival is achieved not by the fittest, it seems, but by those who are truly united.
As Britt Rusert mentioned during our panel, eighteenth and nineteenth century Atlantic history is particularly relevant to the present in that it provides precedents for the way activists are now forced to organize, unsupported and unsanctioned by official state institutions and existing political apparatuses. Despite this hope, a question raised during the roundtable by Sam Sommers has stuck with me: what about the people who are left out of mutual aid societies? Clearly, the survival of subaltern classes in the crises ahead will require more than mutual aid, but I suspect that mutual aid has played a determinative role in forcing states to do better. If Earle’s suggestive fascination with maroon society from across the ocean is any indication, its success put the British state’s failure to support its citizens and less-than-citizens into stark relief, undermining their sense of helpless dependence by providing an attractive alternative and a model for how to keep a community of activists alive to fight for a better social contract another day. Why else would J. Edgar Hoover fret over a little free breakfast?
Suggested Resources:
Earle, William. Obi, or The History of Three-Fingered Jack, edited by Srinivas Aravamudan. Ontario: Broadview, 2005.
Schalk, Sami. Black Disability Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2022.
Spade, Dean. Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next). New York: Verso Books, 2020.
Britt Rusert
Over the past few years, mutual aid has transformed my teaching and my research as an exciting framework through which to rethink the history of social movements and as a way to approach the space of the classroom through abolitionist principles. During the pandemic lockdown, I taught a course on Zoom called “Black Feminist and Queer Insurgencies.” I was struck that students were most interested in the materials on the syllabus that brought them back to the nineteenth century, from Jonathan Wells’ account of the anti-slavery and anti-kidnapping work of the New York Vigilance Committee in The Kidnapping Club (2020) to Kellie Carter Jackson’s history of the politics of revolutionary violence and armed defense among black abolitionists in Force and Freedom (2020). This was a history that students didn’t know, and they found important lessons and blueprints for their own scholarship and activism in decarceration, mutual aid organizing, and transformative justice work. In Fall 2022, I was able to expand on this work by teaching a course titled, “We Protect Us: Early American Histories of Mutual Aid and Community Care” at the American Antiquarian Society, in which students from Worcester-area colleges explored histories of mutual aid and benevolent associations through hands-on work with archival materials and primary collections at the AAS.
I was thrilled to see the CFP for this roundtable on Mutual Aid in Early America at SEA 2023. And the resulting conversation did not disappoint. Ittai Orr’s presentation on Obi; or, the History of Three-Fingered Jack, explored the potential mismatch between anarchism and disability politics while raising provocative historical questions. What was living with a disability like in the eighteenth century? What is the history of enemies of the state? Kimberly Takahata discussed the difficulties of retrieving histories of mutual aid in the contexts of colonialism and slavery, since these forms of organization exist at the “fringes of institutions” and also often seek to be unintelligible to settlers and their knowledge systems. Turning to John Stedman’s Narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted Negroes of Surinam, she finds moments of Black and Native testimony to be a rich site through which to locate traces of insurgent forms of mutual aid. Eagan Dean brought us to the rich worlds of Black women’s literary societies in the Antebellum Period, reminding us that these literary societies often emerged from earlier networks of mutual aid organizing across the Northeast. He also forwarded an idea of mutual intellectual aid, while reminding us that the politics of gender––and racialized gender––need to be centered in any conversation about mutual aid. For my part, I’m in the middle of writing a book that seeks to be a brief and usable history of experiments in Black mutual aid from the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic to the ex-slave reparations movement in the post-Reconstruction period. Departing from Kropotkin and other European and Euro-American anarchists, I instead look to W. E. B. Du Bois as a formative and crucial theorist of mutual aid and its historical and possible relationship to abolitionist practice.
While the conversation about mutual aid has gone mainstream over the past few years, this is a relatively new conversation in literary studies. I walked away from the roundtable wanting to think more about how mutual aid might transform our reading practices. In addition to encouraging us to seek out examples of mutual aid in early American texts, this form of reading might also ask us to decenter protagonists, looking instead to those infrastructures of care, community, and support that often stand behind and make possible the activities of seemingly independent heroes and heroines. During the roundtable, I was also struck by and inspired by the uptake of this urgent conversation among graduate students and junior scholars in our field. I hope that moving forward mutual aid might become something of a keyword in Early American Studies. It offers a way to think about the collective struggle that centers the racialized-gendered division of labor; it also makes an important contribution to both the theory and praxis of mutual aid today.
Suggested Resources:
Aberg-Riger, Ariel. “Solidarity Not Charity: A Visual History of Mutual Aid.” Bloomberg News December 22, 2020.
Du Bois, W. E. B. Economic Co-operation Among the Negro Americans. Atlanta: The Atlanta University Press, 1907.
Maddox, Tyesha. “More than Auxiliary: Caribbean Women and Social Organizations in the Interwar Period.” Caribbean Review of Gender Studies 12 (December 2018): 67-94.
Kimberly Takahata
Mutual aid, by its very definition, works at the edges, caring for those oppressed and ignored by larger, isolating systems. Part of its power is the ability to work outside of institutional structures, caring for the most vulnerable in ways that they want and need. As a result, for scholars of the early Americas, identifying instances of mutual aid can be a fraught task within texts often written by white settler colonizers and enslavers. My presentation at the Society of Early Americanists Biennial Meeting asked, as a result: how can we respect the creativity and power of mutual aid as a way of breaking apart dominating modes of thinking and writing without placing our own demands on mutual aid to appear or act in particular ways?
The answer, I believe, is a small one. Quite literally, these glimpses of possible mutual aid occur in moments as small as conjunctions—as is the case in John Gabriel Stedman’s 1796 A Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam when he considers that Kalina, Lokono, and maroon persons could be aiding one another against Dutch forces; or mentions of “the Indians” bringing enslaved persons cassava when their enslavers do not provide enough in an early nineteenth-century complaint by nine people who were enslaved by Mrs. J Saunders. These moments are easy to miss, and in some instances, appear more hypothetical than confirmed. Those brief presences and those possible moments seem to be exactly the point. These glimpses formally mark the text, either by introducing the voice of enslaved persons like Klaas or Sam, who testified against Mrs. Saunders, or by interrupting the narrative authority of a colonial agent like Stedman. Consequently, mutual aid can be both a narrative agent and a political act, even when gesturing to possible moments of mutual aid. Perhaps just as importantly, these small moments also prevent scholars from being able to come to any clear conclusions, asking academic work today to respect mutual aid without needing to know about all its careful work. These texts testify to possibility and the power that mere possibility can hold.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid became somewhat of a buzzword in national conversation and news coverage (sparking headlines like “So You Want to Get Involved in Mutual Aid,” among others). While a useful introduction to these systems for some folks, this renewed recognition of the support mutual aid provides to those neglected by institutional and political systems also places pressure on mutual aid to “care” in a way that is legible to neoliberal institutions. The concerns for the texts of early Americas echo into our present: how can we support and engage in mutual aid without placing our own demands upon it? The possibility of mutual aid remains powerful because it teaches us that we should always care for the most vulnerable. Simultaneously, mutual aid maintains an ongoing lesson to let others decide how they would like to receive that care, and by whom it should be known.
Suggested Resources:
For a discussion on multiple participants in textual narration, see Nicole Aljoe, Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
For an introduction to mutual aid, see “Mutual Aid 101” and “Big Door Brigade.”