Freedom Flora: Botanical Revision and Community in African American Friendship Albums

Abstract:This article explores the artist, teacher, and writer Sarah Mapps Douglass's multiple entries of botanical watercolors and poetry into the friendship albums of Amy Matilda Cassey and Mary Anne Dickerson. Douglass, Cassey, and Dickerson were all members of Philadelphia's "black elite." As free, middle-class African American women living in antebellum America, their albums and album entries have been critically considered for their displays of black female respectability and public-facing social networks. My own analysis of Douglass's botanical watercolors and poems, however, shifts focus from the public to the private, the exterior to the interior. Through close readings of Douglass's revisionary and citational practices in her entries, I re-direct attention to the imperceptible and immaterial qualities of her watercolors as figures of animation and freedom. I argue that Douglass's entries act as invitations to her African American female friends to turn toward their inner lives as sites of emancipatory expression, untethered by the oppressive restrictions of their outer worlds. By shifting attention to the internal life of both Douglass's flowers and the African American women they represent, I also draw out a more private network of African American female intimacy, support, and solidarity across differences in generation and geography.