February is Black History Month, and our Name in History series will feature mixed-race Cincinnatians who ran successful businesses and lived in the same neighborhood during the middle of the 19th century. Look for the fascinating stories of the hairdresser, the photographer and the landscape painter on WCPO.com on Thursdays this month.
CINCINNATI — Eliza C. Potter became the first African-American woman in Cincinnati to publish her autobiography almost 160 years ago when she penned “A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life.”
The book startled and then captivated Cincinnati. It became a quick best-seller among whites who were curious if they were the subjects of Potter’s sharp, witty descriptions of the brides, belles and beautiful ladies of Cincinnati who, in Potter’s view, postured for social position and shared what one reviewer described as “absurd and tragic secrets.”
Her book included criticism of slave-holders, the nouveau riche and undignified and immoral people as well.
Potter, however, was much more than a groundbreaker for the future authors of salacious, tell-all tales. She was a free black woman, a homeowner and a single mother of two stepchildren whose father gave them their last name but apparently little else.
Known as “Iangy,” she traveled as a maid with rich families to Europe, where she witnessed the baptisms of the Prince of Wales and the Count of Paris as well as the funeral of the Duke of Orleans.
Potter also “dressed and combed” the rich at trendy retreats in the mid-19th century in New Orleans, Saratoga, N.Y., and Newport, R.I.
And even more impressive for a young “mulatto” woman – as she was described in the 1860 Census – she spent three months in a Louisville jail before defeating court charges that she broke the law by telling a Kentucky slave how to escape to Canada and freedom.
She is remembered, albeit by few outside a niche of historians, as the writer of a unique and poignant book. The 30-something hairdresser brushed over very little, wielding a “bold if not polished pen,” noted Nikolas Huot in his essay about Potter in “American Authors, 1745-1945.”
And although she was described by another historian as being “reckless and sometimes rash,” Potter was cautious enough to protect her delicate position of working in a world to which she could never fully belong.
She employed discretion by not naming the names of the upwardly mobile Cincinnati women and traveling families for whom she worked. She referred to her clients and employers, for example, as Miss J, Mrs. W or Miss FF. She didn’t even put her own name on her book, although it was well known she was its author, wrote University of Cincinnati associate professor of English Sharon G. Dean in the introduction of a 1991 reprint of “A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life,” the first since its 1859 debut.
Potter expressed her anti-slavery resolve indirectly through typography, according to Dean. Words in the book printed in italics function as a code that means that African-Americans were being treated wrongly as “goods and chattels.”
Potter used her inside-outsider position as a window into a sometimes wacky world, but she rarely turned a mirror on herself. She said she had come to Cincinnati from New York, but she didn’t name her parents or mention her maiden name.
Where Potter was born isn’t certain, either. She came to Cincinnati from New York, and the 1860 Census lists this as her birthplace. But genealogists and history detectives found official records from later in her life that indicate she was living north of New York City and was born in Virginia. Perhaps, they said, caution motivated Potter to claim Northern roots while she was living near slave states bordering Ohio. Such a claim would make her safer from Southern slave hunters.
Back in New York, Potter could have felt safe enough from slave hunters to be truthful about her birth, postulated University of Michigan associate professor of English Ximora Santamarina in the 2009 second reprint of “A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life.” Santamarina wrote that if Virginia was Potter’s birth state, it is probable that she was born into slavery and escaped north with her parents to New York.
Development of genealogical tools such as ancestry.com and the perseverance of history detectives have since filled in many blanks in Potter’s story, but no photograph of her has been found.
Potter, was, according to Dean, part of a group of young African-Americans who envisioned a better life in the West. And she felt she had what it took “to choose my own course” despite race and color lines that limited her opportunity.
Wrote Dean: “The assets of the vast majority of early black entrepreneurs such as Eliza Potter were ingenuity, energy, industriousness, resourcefulness and a formidable business acumen.”
Potter packed her bag with those characteristics and traveled to Buffalo, N.Y., and then Cincinnati when she was about 20. There, or somewhere along the route after Buffalo, in a moment of what Potter described as weakness, she married a man named Johnson, but there are no indications their union lasted very long.
She chose to settle in Cincinnati possibly because it had the largest African-American community in the former Northwest Territory. There she might have a better chance of finding work as a maid or a wet nurse. She settled in the Little Africa neighborhood near the Ohio River, joined St. Paul’s Episcopal Church and worked her way into the homes of wealthy whites. Somehow, she became stepmother to two children named Potter, indicating she married a second time.
She “combed” as many as 50 women a day while on retreats abroad, and her work in Cincinnati was successful and well-known – as was Potter the person. She wrote the following account of the city’s reaction to her arrest and extradition to Louisville: “Thousands of persons followed me to the ferry-boat, which was to convey me across the Ohio River – some in sorrow and some in joy; all, believing I had made my final exit from Cincinnati – which, however, as the reader will see, was a mistake.”
The 1860 Census shows she lived with her stepchildren, Kate and James, and a young apprentice hairdresser named Louisa Taylor, at 6 Home St., which was approximately where the parking lot across Fifth Street from Duke Convention Center is today. The neighborhood was not far from the city’s shopping and cultural center. Its residents were a mix of blacks and whites, mostly working-class people with families, who, with the exception of a two-day riot Potter witnessed in 1841, got along.
Potter described this common winter sledding scene that took place not far from her home on Elm, Plum and Central streets where they descended to the river: “All sizes and ages, nations and ranks are here collected together, and all are on a footing of equality; the ragged and the neat, rich and poor children go down on the same sled.”
Race relations in Cincinnati, though disrupted by the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation in the 1860s after Potter had left, were peaceful, according to black Cincinnati journalist Wendell P. Dabney’s 1926 book “Cincinnati’s Colored Citizens.”
“In and immediately after the fifties, colored society was in all its glory. Money was plentiful and its leaders found ample opportunity for imitation of the aristocratic white people with whom they came in contact,” Dabney wrote.
Potter moved through her work among white people as if invisible, according to historian Dean. And, he wrote, being of mixed race during the period – as was the case with successful photographer James P. Ball and renowned landscape painter Robert Duncanson, who lived near and likely knew Potter – gave her “the ability to cross racial and social boundaries.”
Dean went so far as to describe Potter as being part of “the black nouveau riche,” and a single record proves she had a good sum of money.
Potter’s home, according to the 1860 Census, was valued at $2,000, and her personal property amounted to $400 (about $65,000 combined in today’s currency). Yet for unknown reasons, she moved away that year and was recorded by the same Census as living in Niagara, N.Y., 17 days after the government recorded her in Cincinnati.
Living with Potter in Niagara was a teenager named Catherine Potter – was that her daughter Kate? – and several other people. There is no James Potter, her son, on that second Census entry.
Had the secrets Potter shared in her book the year before played a role in her seemingly sudden departure? Historian Santamarina addressed that in her introduction to the book’s 2009 printing: “Potter’s revelations may have ruptured the sensitive client fees she had built over the years,” Santamarina wrote.
Inconsistent record-keeping, especially in regard to non-whites, as well as frequent fires that destroyed records in the 19th century resulted in there being many gaps in the personal stories of people like Eliza Potter. For example, Santamarina wrote, it is likely she was born several years before the 1820 date she gave the Census.
Her death remained a mystery for decades until genealogist Reginald Pitts unearthed her death notice in Rye, a small town in West Chester County, N.Y. The date on the notice was 1893, which would have made Potter 73 or a little bit older.
Her exact age was unclear, but her drive to make her own life and the spirit she brought to it are well documented. To that point, Dean cited these examples: Potter had a spat over pay early in her career while working in France. She quit and went to work for a countess. The new job included dressing hair. She loved and was good at it. “Combing” was to be her destiny.
She was a “stranger in a strange land” while working in England. She wrote of one strange memory in her book: “My little charge wanted me to call him Master, but I told him I would not do so, if he were as old as Methuselah. I will leave that word for the South, where it is exacted.”
Potter avoided the South, other than her trips to New Orleans. It seems she felt most comfortable in her final 33 years, living close to Canada where she had relatives who could harbor her if slave hunters came calling.
Her story may have been forgotten for more than 140 years, but Eliza Potter’s “A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life” holds a high place among historians, wrote Dean, in that it “represents the earliest portrait of the rising black middle and upper middle class, and the true progenitors of the New Negro.”
