Spencer Morrison,
On the Island.
March 18. [My emphasis]  
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[^0]:    5 See Thomas C. Holt, 'Marking Race: Race-making, and the Writing of History', American Historical Review 5 (1995), 7: 'It is at [the level of everydayness], I will argue, that race is reproduced via the marking of the racial Other and that racist ideas and practices are naturalized, made self-evident. [...] It is at this level that race is reproduced long after its original historical stimulus - the slave trade and slavery - have faded.' The historian Walter Johnson recently suggested, in Soul by Soul. Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market, 136, that this everyday scale should be applied to the particular racial rituals of the New Orleans slave markets of the antebellum period - 'at no site was race more readily given daily shape than in the slave market' - to the looks exchanged between slaves, buyers and sellers, to the demeaning rituals to which the slaves on sale were subjected, and to their strategies of resistance.  
This notice of a capture can be read in various different ways: for its demographic context - the slave was one of thousands of Africans brought into South Carolina between 1803 and 1808 - for its geographical detail, or the description of clothing it gives. A further possibility is to read it as a debriefing on an encounter or confrontation, a look at that Other, the slave. In describing to the reader this slave freshly imported from the coast of Africa, Spencer Morrison mixes 'objective' details - height, presumed age, the description of clothing and earrings - with value judgments. This slave found just off Charleston is said to have had 'remarkably large white eyes'. It is hard to see this detail as having any descriptive value in enabling the reader to recognize his slave. 'Remarkably large white eyes' in a very black body: that, most probably, is the implied message in the notice. In one sense the arrested slave is as much or even more of a curiosity than a fugitive.