About This Case Study

A runaway advertisement is a small, brutal document: a notice placed in a newspaper by an enslaver, offering a reward for the recapture of a person who had freed themselves. Tens of thousands of them survive, and Freedom on the Move — a crowdsourced research database — has gathered them into a single searchable collection. The ads were written to hunt. But to hunt, the writer had to describe, and so these notices inadvertently preserved the most detailed biographical accounts many enslaved individuals ever received: names, skills, languages spoken, scars, clothing, suspected destinations, the loved ones they might be trying to reach. Each ad is therefore two documents at once — an instrument of pursuit, and an unintended record of a person and an act of self-liberation. Which document you read depends entirely on how you read it.

The unit's two method concepts make the double reading disciplined rather than wishful. Reading along the bias grain, the historian Marisa Fuentes's term, comes first: before extracting anything, account for how the document's purpose — recapture — shaped every detail it contains; an ad is the enslaver's knowledge, arranged for the enslaver's aim. Only then comes the reading against the grain: a carefully bounded recovery of what the notice preserves despite itself. And the recovery has a limit, which the scholar Saidiya Hartman names: the archive will not yield the person's interior life, and writing past the evidence — critical fabulation — is legitimate only when rigorously flagged as such, never smuggled in as fact. This case study is a practicum: you will build a reading protocol, select one advertisement, read it along the grain and then against it, and stop, deliberately and visibly, at the limit.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Freedom on the Move, the database of fugitive-slave advertisements from which you will select your document. Explore the database.
• A note-taking surface set up for two columns — you will build the reading protocol in Phase 1 — plus room to transcribe one advertisement in full.

A note on language: These are enslavers' documents. They contain racist language, people priced as property, and descriptions of scars and injuries recorded for identification. Read every such detail as evidence of the regime that produced it, not as neutral description — and take breaks as you need them.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Recall a time you were described by someone with power over the description — a form, a report card, a file. What did it capture, what did it miss, and what was the description for?
• Can a document written to harm someone become evidence for them? What would using it that way responsibly require?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Protocol (10–12 minutes)

Build your instrument before touching the source. In your own words, define the two moves from this case study's opening: reading along the bias grain, and the bounded recovery with Hartman's limit. Then rule your page into the protocol you will use: a left column headed Along the grain (who wrote this, for what purpose, for which readers, and how that purpose shaped each detail), a right column headed Against the grain (what the ad inadvertently preserves), and a single row across the bottom headed The limit (what neither column can reach). Keep the whole protocol to half a page; its job is to keep you honest, not to be complete.

For groups: Build one shared protocol and agree on its wording before anyone opens the database.

Phase 2: The Ad (8–10 minutes)

Go to Freedom on the Move and select one advertisement — browse or search by place, decade, or keyword, and choose a notice with enough detail to sustain a full reading. Transcribe it into your notes verbatim: every word, including the reward and the enslaver's name, with the ad's date, place of publication, and the database URL and your access date. Read it twice — once fast, once slowly. Resist interpretation; that comes next.

For groups: Pairs scout candidates; the group settles on one primary ad and one backup, chosen for detail.

Phase 3: Along the Grain (12–15 minutes)

Fill the left column:

• Who wrote this, for what purpose, for which readers? What did the writer need those readers to do — and how does that need shape what the ad includes, from clothing to suspected destination?
• Take three details and show the purpose inside each: why is this detail here? What does the enslaver's knowledge of it — a scar, a skill, a likely refuge — reveal about surveillance, proximity, and the household the person fled?
• What does the ad's existence document about the regime around it: the reward, the jails, the newspaper that ran it, the assumption that ordinary readers would help?

For groups: Run the three details as a round — each member argues the purpose inside one detail.

Phase 4: Against the Grain, to the Limit (15–18 minutes)

Now the right column, and the line beneath it:

• Write the bounded recovery as a short paragraph: from the same details, what does the ad preserve despite itself — skill, language, kin, clothing chosen for flight, a destination chosen and why, the act of self-liberation the notice exists to reverse? Every claim must point to a word in your transcription.
• The Hartman test. Write two further sentences about your person: one on the right side of the line — imagination flagged as imagination, held at the evidence's edge — and one over it, fiction wearing history's clothes. Label which is which, and say how you can tell.
• The strain test. Your recovery still speaks from the enslaver's document; the person authorized none of it. Where exactly did your reading hit its evidentiary limit? And what care does putting such notices a click away demand — from the database, and from you as its user?

For groups: Swap recovery paragraphs; mark where your neighbor's paragraph touches or crosses the limit, then run the strain test together.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The ad was written to __________; read against the grain, it preserved __________. The sentence I could not responsibly write was __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what the document was for, exactly what it could not help recording, and exactly where you stopped.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your transcribed ad with its completed two-column protocol, and your recovery paragraph with the two labeled sentences — together they are a worked demonstration of the unit's method on one primary source.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phases 1 and 2 are collaborative; Phase 3 runs as a round; Phase 4 is individual writing, then swapped and marked. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The method's source: Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Publisher page. Reading along the bias grain developed in full — on runaway ads among other records; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The method at book length: Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Publisher page. Critical fabulation practiced across an archive of surveillance, the limit always shown; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The database question: Johnson, Jessica Marie. "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads." Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018): 57–79. Read the article (DOI). What happens when the enslaved become data — the reckoning your strain test opened; it appears in the unit's Further Readings.