Blackness has long been imagined, defined, and reborn through flight and the ceaseless pursuit of a freedom never fully within reach. Eastman Johnson’s A Ride for Liberty – The Fugitive Slaves (recto) captures this tension between enslavement and self-determination. In the painting, a family rides on horseback across a dim, barren landscape. The father holds a young child in front of him, while the mother sits behind, glancing over her shoulder and possibly swaddling a newborn in her arms. The scene is suspended in motion and frozen mid-flight. Time, race, and status are crystallized into a single, perilous moment. The woman’s backward gaze suggests the omnipresent threat of capture, even as dawn breaks ahead. Freedom feels imminent yet uncertain.

According to the Brooklyn Museum, which houses the painting, Johnson claimed to have based this scene on an event he witnessed near a battlefield in Manassas, Virginia, on March 2, 1862, just before Confederate forces surrendered the site to Union troops.¹ Yet the historical accuracy of this account is ultimately secondary. What matters is the painting’s imaginative power, envisioning not a secure freedom but the fragile possibility of becoming free. Through this work, Johnson transforms observation into speculation, crafting a visual meditation on what flight from slavery might look and feel like.

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney describe this condition as a form of “radical homelessness.”² Building on this idea, Rizvana Bradley argues that Western aesthetic tradition was constructed through exclusions that prevent Blackness from ever fully belonging within it.³ If this is the case, then Johnson’s painting reveals how Black life enters the aesthetic not as something settled or “at home,” but as a disruptive, fugitive force that exceeds the very frameworks designed to contain it. Seen in this light, the painting visualizes Blackness as an aesthetic of flight that resists subjugation and remains in perpetual motion.