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Steal Away: Runaway Slaves on Screen
From Louise Beavers’ contented servant in Rainbow on the River (1936) to Hattie McDaniels’ cantankerous mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939) to the enduring fealty of the slaves of Raintree County (1957), enslaved African Americans on screen generally stayed on the plantation. Classical Hollywood’s southern plantation myth argued the protective virtues of slavery and slaves’ need for paternalistic white care. Missing largely from this picture is the runaway slave and the urban destinations to which she often moved. This paper traces the genealogy of the runaway slave on the American screen from the silent era to the present, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1927), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939), Charles Burnett’s Night John (1996), The Birth of a Nation (2016), and the television series Underground (2016). What does the onscreen runaway reveal about Black freedoms—freedoms taken not given? Using archival research into both produced and unproduced Hollywood films and film censorship from industry and state sources, the paper examines the repression and revelation of the runaway’s image on screen and in the American imaginary. This archive unseats and revises the image of the fixed, immobile African American slave who is a subject of both the plantation and the screen. The onscreen runaway not only puts American slavery in its place as an institution against which Black subjects properly and regularly rebelled but the runaway initiates a difficult conversation about the eduring relationship between transgression and freedom in Black life and movement.