In the opening sequence of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s short film Spit on the Broom (2019), we are presented with a long take of a shrouded Black figure, that is, a Black figure shrouded in black, seated in a lush garden, holding a white baby dressed in white. Both are centered in the frame and positioned facing the camera. The film is a “surrealist documentary” on the United Order of Tents, a secret society of Black women founded in 1867 as a Christian mutual aid organization.

Committed to an “ethics of secrecy,” the film does not reveal details about the organization or its members but evokes the spirit of care that underpins their work, linking its history in Reconstruction to the present day. As Yasmina Price notes, the film “allusively honors the subversive history of these Black women without placing them under scrutiny.” It is a film that centers on Black women caring for one another.

To this end, the opening sequence conjures up the visual iconography of Black women as caregivers for white children in order to subvert it. Resonances can be subversions.

The image from Spit on the Broom calls to mind visual iconography of the racialized labor of caretaking exemplified by this carte-de-visite. Marked 1865, just as the military stage of the Civil War was coming to an end, the oval portrait of an uneasy white baby is also a portrait of “two black hands,” as a handwritten inscription on the image’s verso oddly identifies — although it is unclear if this is contemporary with the photograph or a later addition. The record identifies the baby as a girl, likely because of its dress. The Black figure is effaced (absented, erased, concealed), metonymically severed from their (her?) conspicuous hands, transformed into the obscure background on which innocent white fear rests.

The shot of the shrouded caregiver and the emphatically visible, and similarly apprehensive, baby in Spit on the Broom is then an answer to the iconographic tradition of images of wetnurses and caregivers, such as those in the Langmuir Collection. The black covering, embellished with broderie anglaise, is reminiscent of the concealment of the individual whose hands we see in the carte-de-visite.

But Spit on the Broom also offers us a way to subvert this effacement by showing the optical point of view of the covered figure, looking at the camera through the shroud-like veil. Hunt-Ehrlich’s camera returns the gaze. The eyelets of the broderie anglaise function simultaneously as apertures and as an ersatz redaction of the photographer and the act of photographic capture. In her effacement, she becomes conspicuous. The disembodied hands of the carte-de-visite are rejoined to a body and are given eyes—which also become our eyes as viewers.

Hunt-Ehrlich’s iteration of Black caregiving as a visual idiom of enslavement formally answers the nineteenth-century trope with simultaneously more visual information (wider lens, color, sound, full figures), and less (shrouded body, two black hands become one partially obscured and the back of a brown wrist).

Seen together, what forms of caregiving — and expressions of “innocent” white fear — do these images present? How do they offer a different lens on caregiving and show white anxiety as part of the violence enacted by the erasure of the Black body? In her 2019 film, it is Hunt-Ehrlich who takes care of the caregiver. By echoing nineteenth-century images of Black women laboring as caregivers, she performs a gesture of refutation and refusal, an echo that responds to the archive and invites us to see in it murmurs that we might call escape (escaping capture by the camera lens, remaining off screen, elusive, or uncaught?). The secret society of mutual care supplants the overdetermined iconographic insistence of the carte-de-visite marked “two black hands.” Erasures can be strategies for flight. ■

In the opening sequence of Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich’s short film Spit on the Broom (2019), we are presented with a long take of a shrouded Black figure, that is, a Black figure shrouded in black, seated in a lush garden, holding a white baby dressed in white. Both are centered in the frame and positioned facing the camera. The film is a “surrealist documentary” on the United Order of Tents, a secret society of Black women founded in 1867 as a Christian mutual aid organization.

Committed to an “ethics of secrecy,” the film does not reveal details about the organization or its members but evokes the spirit of care that underpins their work, linking its history in Reconstruction to the present day. As Yasmina Price notes, the film “allusively honors the subversive history of these Black women without placing them under scrutiny.” It is a film that centers on Black women caring for one another.

To this end, the opening sequence conjures up the visual iconography of Black women as caregivers for white children in order to subvert it. Resonances can be subversions.

The image from Spit on the Broom calls to mind visual iconography of the racialized labor of caretaking exemplified by this carte-de-visite. Marked 1865, just as the military stage of the Civil War was coming to an end, the oval portrait of an uneasy white baby is also a portrait of “two black hands,” as a handwritten inscription on the image’s verso oddly identifies — although it is unclear if this is contemporary with the photograph or a later addition. The record identifies the baby as a girl, likely because of its dress. The Black figure is effaced (absented, erased, concealed), metonymically severed from their (her?) conspicuous hands, transformed into the obscure background on which innocent white fear rests.

The shot of the shrouded caregiver and the emphatically visible, and similarly apprehensive, baby in Spit on the Broom is then an answer to the iconographic tradition of images of wetnurses and caregivers, such as those in the Langmuir Collection. The black covering, embellished with broderie anglaise, is reminiscent of the concealment of the individual whose hands we see in the carte-de-visite.

But Spit on the Broom also offers us a way to subvert this effacement by showing the optical point of view of the covered figure, looking at the camera through the shroud-like veil. Hunt-Ehrlich’s camera returns the gaze. The eyelets of the broderie anglaise function simultaneously as apertures and as an ersatz redaction of the photographer and the act of photographic capture. In her effacement, she becomes conspicuous. The disembodied hands of the carte-de-visite are rejoined to a body and are given eyes—which also become our eyes as viewers.

Hunt-Ehrlich’s iteration of Black caregiving as a visual idiom of enslavement formally answers the nineteenth-century trope with simultaneously more visual information (wider lens, color, sound, full figures), and less (shrouded body, two black hands become one partially obscured and the back of a brown wrist).

Seen together, what forms of caregiving — and expressions of “innocent” white fear — do these images present? How do they offer a different lens on caregiving and show white anxiety as part of the violence enacted by the erasure of the Black body? In her 2019 film, it is Hunt-Ehrlich who takes care of the caregiver. By echoing nineteenth-century images of Black women laboring as caregivers, she performs a gesture of refutation and refusal, an echo that responds to the archive and invites us to see in it murmurs that we might call escape (escaping capture by the camera lens, remaining off screen, elusive, or uncaught?). The secret society of mutual care supplants the overdetermined iconographic insistence of the carte-de-visite marked “two black hands.” Erasures can be strategies for flight. ■