Where the fugitive was not ugly, he was often described, like Quaco, using the vocabulary of size and disproportion. The notice was a caricature and proceeded from hyperbole, as is indicated, unambiguously, by the recurring use of the intensifying adverbs or superlatives 'very', 'extremely', 'uncommonly', 'exceedingly' and 'remarkably' when describing the lips, mouth, eyes, nose, breasts or feet of the fugitives. Take for example Chloe, a slave from Carolina, the subject of a notice in the Charleston Gazette in June 1803. Almost nothing is known about  
her except that she had 'remarkable large breast and very thick lips' (City Gazette, 14 June 1803). The description is of no help in painting a picture, even a vague one, of the slave in question. The reader would have difficulty recognizing her in the street and would probably not be much helped by her height: '[she] is about five feet three or four inches high'. But the description is not altogether useless and would in all likelihood be familiar to the reader. In fact, as Winthrop Jordan clearly shows in White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, the size of the nose, lips and breasts were among the demeaning tropes in the rhetoric about blacks from the seventeenth century onward (Jordan, 1968, p. 10). Women's breasts, in particular, crystallized those prejudices. They were at the same time a symbol of maternity and also of unbridled sexual passion. The frequently hyperbolic nature of the notices transformed the fugitive into a freakish spectacle and functioned as a reminder of the racial superiority of the narrator and the readers. As Shane White explains in his study of fugitive slave notices from New York, 'Even ostensibly objective descriptions of "thick lips" or "flat noses" then, are freighted with cultural meaning, referring back to a whole body of "scientific speculation" about the physical origins and intellectual capacity of blacks' (White, 1991, p. 120).