Many Hands

In this article, Mariah Kupfner examines how the material culture of eighteenth-century Boston reveals the racialized dynamics of labor, authorship, and presence embedded within enslaving households. Focusing on the intertwined work of Mary Fleet, a young white stitcher, and Peter Fleet, a printer and woodcut artist enslaved in Mary’s father’s printshop and household, Kupfner argues that objects traditionally attributed to white artisans must be reinterpreted as products of many hands—enslaved, free, Black, and white. Through close analysis of Mary’s needlework compositions and Peter’s print and carving practices, the article demonstrates how elite decorative work relied on the labor, skill, and aesthetic influence of enslaved craftspeople, even as seemingly white-authored objects obscured their contributions. Situating these interwoven material practices within broader scholarship on Black craftspeople, critical fabulation, racial formation, and New England slavery, Kupfner emphasizes how print and textile production both enacted and concealed the construction of whiteness and the exploitation of Black labor. Analyzing archival traces, such as wills, probate records, runaway advertisements, and print ephemera, the author reconstructs the skilled, creative, and self-fashioning practices of enslaved artisans like Peter Fleet and his descendants. Ultimately, the article calls for reading colonial material culture as inherently collective and racially entangled, revealing enslaved makers’ presence, ingenuity, and influence within objects long viewed as singularly authored.