Turning Wounds into Wisdom and Pain into Power: Female Slave Resistance against Bodily Sufferings in Antebellum America
Marcella Schute
University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities MA Thesis: American Studies Student Number: 12853291 marcella.schute@gmail.com Supervisor: Dr Katy Hull June, 2020
Abstract
In the 1980s, historians started to pay attention to female slave resistance and the body politics of enslaved women. They discovered that slave women participated in everyday forms of resistance. While male slave resistance was often visible and organized, slave women resisted in more secretive and unconventional ways. That their methods of resistance happened in the private rather than in the public sphere does not mean that their actions were less confrontational: their methods were as challenging as the actions of slave men. This thesis focuses on female slave resistance in antebellum America and shows that slave women turned their bodies into powerful weapons through which they exerted agency. They resisted against sexual exploitation and abuse, against their masters’ reproductive desires through abortion and infanticide, and they manipulated their mistresses’ breastfeeding orders through the practice of wet-nursing. Slave women knew how to find power in the places least
expected, and when they did so, they became active agents within the patriarchal sphere originally dominated by their slave owners.
Table of Contents
Introduction 4
1. “Something Akin to Freedom”: Exerting Agency by Resisting 13 Sexual Exploitation
2. “I Was as Cool as I Now Am”: Abortion and Infanticide as Methods of 27 Resistance
3. “These Black Titties Sucked You, and Then You Come Out Here to 42 Beat Me?”: The Body Politics of Slave Wet-Nursing
Conclusion 55
Introduction
On a certain plantation in Georgia, in the deep American South, an old slave named Sylva had promised herself that she would never let her children experience the same horrors she endured. One time, her master was so angry that he wrung off four of Sylva’s toes. Now, she only has six toes left: four on one foot, two on the other. Sylva was a true victim of her master’s abuse. Rather than bringing her children into this evil world, she took matters – quite literally – into her own hands. Sylva had been the mother of thirteen children, and rather than having them suffer in slavery, she killed all of them, in their infancy, with her own bare hands.1
Although it might seem at first glance that Sylva was driven by insanity, a closer inspection of Sylva’s act exposes something else: agency. While the act of infanticide is an example through which slaves could express their anger against their masters, slave women used their bodies in all kind of ways to resist against the slavery institution. Since slaves were property, the black female body legally belonged to the plantation owners and were used for economic purposes. However, due to the immense bodily sufferings of enslaved women, according to historian Stephanie Camp, the black female body also became a “political entity” and “a site of both domination and resistance.”2
This thesis explores female slave resistance in antebellum America with a focus on the body politics of enslaved women. Not all forms of slave women’s bodily resistance have yet been explored and some forms – particularly those related to the most intimate spheres – are still overlooked or marginalized in academic studies. Since slave women lived in a patriarchal society where stereotypical perceptions of race, gender and class dominated the political landscape, the sources in which slave women’s voices and actions are expressed are limited.3 Nonetheless, this thesis aspires to put slave women’s voices at the forefront and aims to find power in unexpected places.
When the historiography on slave resistance arose, historians recognized men as the leaders of the struggle. Their female counterparts remained in the margins at best and
shadows as worst. Herbert Aptheker was the first historian to write about slave rebellions and revolts in 1937.4 He researched large slave revolts in the United States, such as the famous
1 Charles Grandison Parsons, Inside View of Slavery: Or A Tour Among the Planters (Boston, 1855).
2 Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 62.
3 For example, the story about the old slave Sylva was told by Mrs. A., Sylva’s mistress, rather than,
unfortunately, by Sylva herself.
Nat Turner’s Rebellion. By drawing from about two hundred and fifty slave revolts and conspiracies, Aptheker claimed that there were eight forms of desperate struggles of slaves, of which none “have received anything like the treatment they deserve.”5 These included purchasing freedom, strikes, acts of sabotage, suicide, escape, enlistment in the federal army, and “anti-slavery agitation,” as well as outright revolt.6 At first glance, Aptheker’s eight forms of resistance may appear to be comprehensive. But his work contained a bias toward male-dominated forms of slave resistance, which overlooked the more intimate forms of bodily resistance that were available to female slaves.
Shortly after Aptheker’s article on slave revolts, Raymond Bauer and Alice Bauer published an article on slave resistance in 1942.7 They disproved the notion that slaves were docile and content.Their article discussed patterns of resistance and also covered slave women and infanticide: Bauer and Bauer were the first historians to use the story of Sylva in the light of female slave resistance. The scholars concluded that, based on this evidence, one method of resistance was “the possibility that a significant number of slave mothers killed their children.”8 The topic and arguments of this paper were original, not only because the authors covered slave resistance, which was a new and modern subject, but also because they paid attention to gender, which was especially striking since the discipline of women’s history only formalized in the 1970s. But there was a noticeable lack of follow up on Bauer and Bauer’s findings by other historians for three decades.
In the 1970s, historians increasingly challenged forms of “plantation nostalgia,” where slaves were represented as submissive and obeyed their masters’ orders.9 They moved to topics as slave resistance and oppression, influenced by the civil rights movement. A high point in the scholarship on slave resistance was reached in 1974 when Eugene D. Genovese published his book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made.10 Like Aptheker and Bauer and Bauer, Genovese corrected the myth that slaves were docile and content. Instead of conventionally displaying the slaves as victims, Genovese recognized agency in slave acts and illuminated methods of resistance. He covered many forms of slave resistance, ranging from large forms as open rebellions to small forms of resistance as work slowdowns. He
5 Aptheker, “American Negro Slave Revolts,” 512. 6 Aptheker, “American Negro Slave Revolts,” 512.
7 Raymond A. Bauer and Alice H. Bauer, “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery,” The Journal of Negro History 27,
no. 4 (1942): 388–419.
8 Bauer and Bauer, “Day to Day Resistance to Slavery,” 417. 9 Camp, Closer to Freedom, 1.
redefined resistance as the efforts carried out by slaves where they opposed their slave statuses. Genovese has been criticized however, not only for romanticizing the relationship between slaveowners and their female slaves, but also for putting the lives and the voices of the slaveholders in the foreground, leaving the voices of the slaves in the background.
Due to the rise of the discipline of women’s history, historians finally turned their attention to female slave resistance in 1979.11 Darlene Clark Hine expanded on Bauer and Bauer’s observations and reflected more on the widespread practices of resistance. Her article discussed the female body specifically by focusing on sexual exploitation, abortion and infanticide. She demonstrated that the body of enslaved women was more than only a personal and private matter: it became a political sphere through which black women resisted. Hine presented a strong argument that female slave resistance was a topic yet unexplored and overlooked by previous historians.
Writing in 1981, the black feminist scholar and activist Angela Davis focused more on the experiences of black women than on slave resistance specifically.12 Davis criticized the contemporary historiographical debate on slavery since it focused too much on the male perspective.Davis noted that “a book expressly devoted to slave women” was absent from the current historical dialogue.13 Deborah White answered Davis by publishing a book in 1985 that provided a whole inquiry on the treatment of female slaves on the southern
plantations.14 White argued that black males and females experienced slavery differently. She became an important historian in this debate since she also focused on the somatic
experiences of enslaved women.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese added a new dimension to the historical dialogue by
exploring the interrelatedness of white and black female slaves in the plantation household in the South.15 However, Fox-Genovese has been criticized for mostly focusing on the
perspective of plantation housewives and slaveholders, thereby diminishing the agency of
11 Darlene Clark Hine, “Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex,” Western Journal of Black Studies
(1979): 123-127.
12 Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981).
13 Davis, Women, Race and Class, 2. Davis only briefly focused on resistance, arguing that “women resisted and
advocated challenges to slavery at every turn.” See Davis, Women, Race and Class, 21-22.
14 Deborah G. White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).
For the experiences of enslaved women within the plantation household, see also Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love,
Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books,
1985).
15Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women Of the Old South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
enslaved women.16 Hine, together with David Barry Gaspar, made a similar interjection in the 1990s, arguing that female slave was less confrontational than male resistance, because women aimed foremost to survive dehumanization and abuse.17 Just like Fox-Genovese, Gaspar and Hine’s argument provided a controversial view on women slave resistance that future historians would disprove.
Stephanie Camp is a more recent historian who strongly disagreed with the claim that female slave resistance was less confrontational.18 Camp argues that slave women
participated in “everyday resistance,” that could be every bit as challenging as the actions of male slaves to white slaveowners’ dominance.19 She asserted that the attention of historians needed to shift from public rebellions and revolts that were visible and organized, like Aptheker did, to acts of resistance in the private work place, which were frequently hidden and informal. Only when these private spaces were recognized and analyzed, could it be understood that the bodies of slave women were inevitably “political arenas.”20 By focusing on gender, geography, social interactions and, most importantly, the physical body, Camp explored how women challenged the power dynamics of slavery.21 In the same year that Camp published her monograph, Jennifer Morgan published her research on production and reproduction in the slavery system. While Morgan does not focus on North America but rather on the colony Barbados, her work is a valuable addition to the literature on slave women’s bodies because she argues that, while reproduction was central in the slavery system, the bodies of slave women could exert power.22
Building on Camp, the historian Thavolia Glymph dismantled Fox-Genovese’s principal arguments.23 Her book is the most recent work on female slave resistance that also covers the importance of the female body and the significance of slave women’s agency. She challenges the existing scholarship by focusing on violence and power in the plantation household and “the female side of domination.”24 Rather than arguing that female slaves
16 See Renee K. Harrison, Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the
Plantation Household (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Camp, Closer to Freedom.
17 David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
18 Camp, Closer to Freedom. 19 Camp, 3.
20 Camp, 3. 21 Camp, 3-4.
22 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
23 Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008).
suffered under the patriarchal or paternal system, she demonstrates how they resisted against their white female counterparts. Therewith, she shows the agency of black women against their white mistresses in their daily resistance.
Like the works of Glymph and Camp, this thesis too seeks to spotlight agency in slave women’s acts of daily resistance by focusing on the black female body. Whilst the provided literature enriches an understanding of female slave resistance and the black body as a
political entity, certain important topics are only briefly discussed or still left unexplored. The topics at the heart of this research are sexual exploitation, reproductive choice (abortion and infanticide), and wet-nursing.25 The central argument of this thesis is that slave women used their bodies as a method of resistance against the institution of slavery and that, by doing so, they became the active agents within a political sphere originally dominated by their
slaveowners.
Agency is not a self-evident term, and its application to the topic of slave resistance has sparked some controversy. Walter Johnson can be considered the leading authority when it comes to agency and slavery.26 Writing in 2003, he expressed his concern about the way historians have previously analyzed agency in slaves actions by applying their modern world conceptions and perspectives to slave historic events. Johnson was especially skeptical about historians “‘who give the slaves back their agency.’”27 He argued that rather than excessively recognizing agency in slave actions in line with “historical redress,” historians should re-immerse themselves into “the nightmare of History.”28 In other words, instead of trying to fix history, historians should acknowledge the historical circumstances and the ideological discourse that circulated around that time. Johnson concludes by strongly arguing that agency, humanity and resistance are not synonymous. He claims that agency had previously often been linked to resistance, with an implication that this is what made slaves human. Slaves were, according to Johnson, human regardless of their resistance and their agency.
25 Hine has previously discussed these topics as well in her 1979 article on female slave resistance. However,
she also stated in a later publication that slave women participated in less confrontational methods of resistance. This thesis builds on her work by exploring the same topics even further, but disagrees with her argument that female slave resistance was less confrontational. While Hine does not refer to wet-nursing as an act of resistance, it is striking that she does refer to this practice in her article. She writes: “while Genovese gives evidence of the mammy’s manipulation of her favoured position, the pivotal question of how it must have felt to be forced to nurse and raise her future oppressors remains unexamined.” This thesis answers to that question. Wet-nursing is still a largely overlooked topic in the historical scholarship on slave resistance. That is why this thesis explores the practice of wet-nursing, and, additionally, also recognizes agency and resistance in this practice. See Hine, “Female Slave Resistance: The Economics of Sex,” 123.
26 Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 1 (2003): 113-24. 27 Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” 114.
This thesis is in agreement with Johnson that it is important to recognize the
“nightmare of History” – and specifically the horrors of slavery – where acts of agency are analyzed. Some scholars who have studied slave resistance and agency in the past have credited slaves so much for their power that the horrors of slavery faded away in their argument or were left ignored. They fell into a trap of romanticizing slave resistance.29 This is dangerous since it diminishes the abhorrence of slavery. However, Johnson’s criticism of the historians who excessively recognize agency in slave actions in line with “historical redress” is also problematic, for it jeopardizes the overall recognition of agency and slave resistance. Johnson’s warning creates a potentially paralyzing effect when interpreting primary source material, in which a historian may not dare to recognize agency such as it is conveyed in the sources. Rather than siding with one of these rigid dichotomies, the argument of this thesis is that slave women could both be agents and victims at the same time.
This thesis disagrees with Johnson’s claim that agency should be discussed independently from resistance. While this thesis acknowledges that slaves were human regardless of the agency they exerted and their acts of resistance, agency and resistance can still be equivalents, especially when it comes to female slave resistance.30 On her blog, the historian Erika R. Rendon-Ramos (then a PhD Candidate at Rice University) wrote that “something else worth exploring is how Johnson’s ‘On Agency’ argument can be applied to women or other marginalized groups. Are analyses of women as agents limited because they are framed in the context of their gender and not as a part of a larger whole?”31 This paper responds to that question by showing how women’s agency was deeply intertwined with their gender and sex.
Primary source material consulted for this thesis range from slave narratives, journals, newspaper articles, reports, interviews and letters. The geographical focus of this thesis is antebellum America, of which most sources focus on the American South. The source material can be divided into two categories. The first consists of sources that provide the perspectives of the slaves, which mostly include slave narratives. The second category
29 Camp, Closer to Freedom, 2.
30 Agency in this paper is defined as a situation where someone is able or capable to exert power through a
certain action or activity, which produces a particular effect. The effect in this definition is recognized as resistance. See also “agency, n.”. OED Online. June 2020. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.proxy.uba.uva.nl:2443/view/Entry/3851?redirectedFrom=agency
31 “Walter Johnson’s ‘On Agency’ and 19th Century Scholarship | Erika R. Rendón-Ramos,”
consists of sources that provide different views, mostly from slaveholders, journalists, abolitionists, politicians and physicians. Both categories require further explanation.
Concerning the first category, the slave narratives from Harriet Jacobs and Sojourner Truth stand central in this thesis. The slave narrative from Harriet Ann Jacobs called
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was written by Jacobs herself but not published under her
real name. She used the pseudonym Linda Brent, to protect her relatives.32 Some historians still claim that her narrative contains fictional aspects and biased material, especially since her audience were white middle-class readers. One reason for this is that Incidents was edited by Lydia Maria Child, a white writer of fiction. Additionally, it was often believed that the purpose of the narrative was to have the white public sympathize with Jacobs and to gather their support for the abolitionist movement. Next to Incidents, the Narrative of Sojourner
Truth: A Northern Slave also contains problems concerning reliability.33 Truth’s real name was Isabella Baumfree, but she changed it to Sojourner Truth in 1843. She was a slave from New York, and since this was a former colony of the Netherlands, Truth grew up only speaking Dutch. Because Truth could not read or write herself and her mother language was Dutch, she dictated her experiences to her friend Olive Gilbert, a white abolitionist. This has left historians questioning how trustworthy her narrative really is. Despite the controversy, this thesis takes a more forgiving view of these narratives, in recognition that all
autobiographical and semi-autobiographical sources are constructed, but that the act of construction in itself can be of great historical value. Both narratives include rich
observations of female slaves and spotlight the way both Jacobs and Truth resisted against the slavery system. In addition, the narratives are especially useful since it becomes clear that agency is not only recognized in their acts, but also in the narrators’ decisions on what
information they decided to include and what information they, deliberately, kept hidden. The WPA Slave Narrative Collection is largely referenced in this paper, even though some controversy exists surrounding this source as well.34 However problematic the source
32 Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written By Herself, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1861, 1987).
33 Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth; a Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century; with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence, Drawn from Her “Book of Life,” ed. Frances W. Titus (Boston, 1875),
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/truth75/truth75.html. For critical assessment of the utility of Jacob’s narrative see John Blassingame, “Critical Essay on Sources,” The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 367-82. For a critical assessment of the use of Truth’s
narrative see Kimberly R. Connor, Conversions and Visions in the Writings of African-American Women (Knoxville: University of Tennesee Press, 1995), 73.
34 The Works Progress Administration (WPA) was an American New Deal agency that recruited interviewers in
might be, this thesis aims to put black people’s own voices in the foreground, even if they are inevitably mediated by white writers and interpreters due to the power structures of society. The respondents still provided the interviewers with rich, personal observations about their motivations to resist and how they used their bodies to do so. The fact that the dominant power structures likely incentivized respondents to sugar-coat their experiences of slavery makes the insights they provide into resistance even more powerful.
In addition to the narrative of Jacobs and Truth and the WPA Slave Narrative Collection, other accounts referred to in this thesis are the narratives of the slaves Moses Grandy, a former slave from North Carolina, and Lewis Clarke, an ex-slave from Kentucky. While both narratives are written by male slaves, they contain important accounts of the bodily sufferings of enslaved women. The constructed nature of the narratives of Grandy and Clarke is, again, in itself a form of agency. Therefore, when these narratives are used, it will also be analysed why Grandy and Clarke decided to share this information.
Complementary to the first category, the second category covers primary source material from others than slaves. While these sources do not contain the voices of slave women, they are unique for they provide an external view on slave behavior and therefore, also, resistance. Since the female body lies at the heart of this analysis, various source material from physicians are used that reflect on the bodily practices of enslaved and free African American women. Although it is frustrating that most of these records come from white male medical authorities, they provide additional insights into power relations. Additionally, narratives from slave-owners, like Maryland slave-owner John Blackford, as well as abolitionists, like Frederick Law Olmsted, inform the analysis, along with letters, from Thomas Jefferson for example, and newspaper articles. It must be addressed that many slaves were not able to write, which is why their acts of resistance are sometimes only recognized when addressed by people who were literate.
The paper is divided into three chapters. The first analyses sexual exploitation and abuse. It details how slave women resisted against these acts. The primary sources used in this chapter include the slave narratives of Jacobs and Truth. Additionally, by focusing on
gather the stories of former slaves, from either themselves, their children or their grandchildren, so that these stories would not get lost. However, the people employed for this administration were mostly white and interviews were conducted many years after emancipation. This could have affected the answers of the respondents and created problems concerning reliability. For scholars who discuss the value of the WPA narratives see Vann. C. Woodward, “Woo,” American Historical Review 79 (1974): 470–81: Thomas F. Soapes, “The Federal Writers' Project Slave Interviews: Useful Data or Misleading Source,” Oral History Review 2 (1977): 33-38.
these narratives, this chapter explores how women could exert agency through words and silence concerning sexual exploitation. The second chapter focuses on reproductive choice. It explores how abortion and infanticide were methods of resistance and argues that
reproductive choices were not impulsive acts, but rather strategic decisions. Chapter three explores the practice of wet nursing. It details that wet nursing was practiced much more frequently than is often believed and demonstrates that slave women could exert agency through this practice. The conclusion sheds light on how slave women could exert power through their bodies. It demonstrates that slave women’s bodies were political entities through which they could tackle the overall institution of slavery more strategically and effectively than is commonly believed.
Chapter 1: “Something Akin to Freedom”: Exerting Agency by Resisting Sexual Exploitation
But I now entered on my fifteenth year — a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. I tried to treat them with indifference or contempt… He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master.35
This passage from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl exemplifies that slave women struggled on many fronts, one of which was their experience with sexual exploitation and abuse. Harriet Ann Jacobs was only fifteen years old when she became a victim of her master’s sexual desires. Sexual exploitation was certainly not always physical; slave women also suffered from mental abuse, which could be just as denigrating. Although maybe unconsciously, Jacobs already resisted her masters actions at a young age. She strategically states: “I tried to treat him with indifference or contempt.”36 While the intimate sphere was a place of shame and humiliation in which slave women suffered, they were also able to transfer their bodies and minds into powerful weapons.
Double Burden
It is crucial to understand the details of the work environment of southern slave women in order to understand how they showed resistance against sexual abuse. Slave
women carried the double burden of labor and their responsibility for the domestic sphere. As noted by the historian Thelma Jennings, the lives of female slaves can be considered more severe than those of male slaves, since they, on top of the work they were assigned to do, also “had to bear children and cope with sexual abuse.”37 This while the work of enslaved men was “often similar in type and quantity.”38 On the southern plantations, the hours of labor for slave women were longer than those of men. Both men and women worked on the plantation during daytime. However, women had to continue working after their first shift ended. When the field work, which consisted of cultivating sugar, tobacco, rice and most often cotton, was
35 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 30. 36 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 30.
37 Thelma Jennings. “‘Us Colored Women Had to Go Through A Plenty’: Sexual Exploitation of
African-American Slave Women,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (1990): 45.
over at the end of the day, women moved to household labor as cooking, cleaning, washing and spinning. While they sometimes carried on their labor within the household of their masters and mistresses, they more often had to provide the primary needs for their own families. Sometimes, slave men also performed extra work in the field at night. Yet, the second shift of women was “a greater and more consistent burden.”39
The atmosphere inside the slaveholders’ homes differed from the sphere of the
plantation field. While slave women were not as homebound as domestic white women were, the household was a place where slaves were constantly surrounded by their slaveholders, whether this was their master or their mistress. As Camp, Fox-Genovese and Glymph have all argued before, it is important to acknowledge that the household was a site of production and reproduction – both an economically exploitative and an intimately abusive sphere. For southern slave women, the great home was not a private, but rather a public sphere – a place where they experienced power dynamics and the economic consequences of the slavery system. Antebellum southern slave women thus dealt with race, gender and class relations day in and day out, which ultimately shaped their identities and their lives.
Plantation Mistresses and Violence
When the tensions in the household heightened, the slaves felt the consequences. It is a misconception to believe that “plantation mistresses wielded little or no power” in the white patriarchy, according to Glymph.40 Her research demonstrates that “white women beat slave women and, more rarely, killed them.”41 Slave women were not only abused by men, but they also frequently “received the back of their mistress’s hand.” Plantation mistresses “yanked hair, pulled ears, smacked faces, burned skin, punched bodies, and stabbed at random.”42 Despite the extent of violence inflicted by mistresses on slave women, as a subject in academic scholarship it is often overlooked or ignored. Glymph writes that in the plantation South “white gender ideals clashed with white women’s domestic dominance.”43 The same can be stated about some historians, who had trouble believing that white woman, construed as embodiments of Victorian standards of femininity, were often the perpetrators of violence. Many scholars believed that slaveholding men were responsible for almost all acts of
premeditated violence, and assumed that white women would act out only occasionally, in
39 Camp, Closer to Freedom, 32.
40 Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, 5. 41 Glymph, 5.
42 Camp, Closer to Freedom, 43.
the heat of the moment. Implicitly, they excused this violence as less systematic than that committed by male slave-owners.
The Horrors of Reproduction
While the physical punishment of white mistresses inflicted bodily suffering on enslaved women, it was white planters and non-elite men who took advantage of their bodies.44 Enslaved women’s bodies were “exploited in the fields and sexually violated in the quarters.”45 Previous scholarship mostly focused on the exposure of violence in the fields; not only because it is easier to detect, but also because labor on the plantation was continually watched by slaveholders and overseers. It has to be acknowledged that this was different inside the house, where violation happened within walls and behind closed doors, making sexual exploitation and abuse less visible to the public. But the household provided a sphere where relations between slaves and slaveholders were more personal than on the plantation, with devastating consequences.
The fact that white masters sexually abused their slaves points to another reason why the private house was actually a public arena: the desire of reproduction had economic motives. More slaves meant more profit. Several court records demonstrate confessions of women slaves admitting that their masters desired more children.46 Jennings, who used the WPA narratives as primary material and focused for the first time on the study of enslaved women particularly by using these narratives, acknowledged that reproduction was not a myth: “it did occur throughout the South and was not confined to any one region or state.”47 For example, WPA respondent Hilliard Yellerday from North Carolina recalled how the master of her parents considered his slaves fortune to be his chattel. He had so many slaves that he could not remember all their names. Tellingly, he did not sell many slaves, nor did he buy them: he rather “resorted to raising his own slaves.”48
Most masters conceived of slave breeding in terms of both quality and quantity: they desired not only more slaves, but also physically stronger ones. A certain woman WPA respondent from Missouri stated that “when they want to raise a certain kind of breed of
44 Camp, Closer to Freedom, 42. 45 Camp, 42.
46 Jennings, “‘Us Colored Women had to Go Through A Plenty,’” 46. 47 Jennings, 49.
48 Hilliard Yellerday, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United States
of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 11, part 2, 434. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn112/.
chillum they just mixed us up.”49 They would tell “de nigger dis is your wife or dis is your husband and dey take each other and not know no better and raise big families to de white folks liking.”50 Slaveholders treated their slaves like livestock. While masters engaged in this process without restraint, the physical and mental anguishes of enslaved women were often ignored.51 According to William Ward, a slave from Georgia, they used to take women away from their husbands and put them with another man to breed “jes’ like dey would do cattle.”52
An even more striking story comes from another Missouri woman who recalled how her grandmother was a “fine seamstress.”53 Three days after she had given birth to her first baby, her mistress demanded her to sew twelve white t-shirts for her oldest son who would soon go to college. Her grandmother was so sick and weak, that some of the stitches in the t-shirt were misshapen. The mistress told the overseer to beat her up, but the doctor said that there was no sense in beating her, since she was “stone blind.” But, said the doctor, “she can have chillun right on,” and so they “kept her for dat and she bore twelve more head of chillun after dat.”54 This shows that doctors understood the reproductive desires of slaveholders, and deemed the economic motives of their clients more important than the feelings and emotions of their patients.
The fact that a blind slave woman produced twelve children might make on wonder whether she cooperated with her master’s desires without restraint. It has to be understood that masters both punished and rewarded slaves in the slave breeding process. Resistance was difficult, as this often led to whippings or other forms of physical punishment. If a woman, for instance, refused to bear children, they would make her work to death or sell her. On the contrary, slaves were rewarded when they participated in slave breeding, as they were provided with more free time and often spared whippings.55
49 Ex-slave from Missouri, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United
States of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 10, 216. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn100/.
50 Ex-slave from Missouri, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United
States of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. IV, part 4, 292. https://www.loc.gov/item/mesn044/.
51 Morgan, Laboring Women, 11.
52 William Ward, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United States of
America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 4, part 4, 133. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.044/?st=gallery.
53 Ex-slave from Missouri, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United
States of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 10, 215.
54 Ex-slave from Missouri, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United
States of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 10, 215.
Forced Interracial Sex
While slaveowners often forced slave men and slave women to produce children, many slave women were also sexually abused by their masters.56 Even though slave breeding was an ongoing process in antebellum America, Jennings claimed that “forced interracial sex was more frequent than slave breeding.”57 One former slave from Georgia recalled how “white men went with colored gals and women bold. Any time they saw one and wanted her, she had to go with him and his wife didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout it.”58 It also becomes clear from these accounts that white mistresses were often aware of their husbands’ deeds, but there was nothing they could do to prevent it from happening. In fact, they often blamed the slaves instead of the masters as result of jealousy. This led to more tensions, violence and fights within the household.
Jacobs concludes in her narrative that “if God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse.”59 A former slave from Georgia also stated that that the prettier a slave girl was, the more unfortunate these girls often were. Some masters would buy slave girls and women just because they were pretty. One master had “a pretty gal he was going with.” He would let her “work nowhere but in the house, and his wife nor nobody else didn’t say nothin’ bout it: they knew better.” The girl conceived three children with him. When her master died, his brother came, and “got the gal and the chillum.”60 Former slave Elizabeth Keckley was also unfortunate because of the way she looked. She was a slave for thirty years and ended up working as a seamstress in the White House, for the wife of Abraham Lincoln. She recalled how she was “regarded as fair-looking for one of my race, and for four years a white man.” This man “persecuted me for four years, and I⎯ I⎯ became a mother.”61
The WPA interviewer who interviewed Sam and Louisa Evert, former slaves,
summarized their experiences and recalled that on the plantation where they lived, more than a hundred slaves were made “indiscriminately and without any regard for family unions.” Their master was a nasty man, who much “enjoyed these orgies” and “often entertained his
56 Jennings, 50. 57 Jennings, 61.
58 Ex-slave from Georgia, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United
States of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 4, part 4, 133. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.044/?st=gallery.
59 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 31.
60 Ex-slave from Georgia, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United
States of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 4, part 4, 295. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.044/?st=gallery.
61 Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (New
friends in this manner.” He and his guests would “engage in these debaucheries” where they chose for themselves the most prettiest girl or woman. Sometimes, they even “forced the unhappy husbands and lovers of their victims to look on.”62 While it is widely known that many masters were cruel to their slaves, these accounts demonstrate once again that some slaveowners completely lacked humanity in the largest sense.
Agency and Resistance Against Sexual Exploitation and Abuse
Due to slaveowners reproductive desires and the way they sexually exploited their slaves, it becomes comprehensible why Harriet Jacobs wrote in her narrative that “slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”63 What mostly distinguished the lives of women in slavery from men is, according to Camp, their reproductive labor and sexual exploitation and abuse, which were “unique forms of bodily suffering.”64
But, while women physically and mentally suffered from their masters abuse, they also resisted these actions. By opposing their masters’ mistreatments, women showed that they were the agents over their body. This, for example, appears in the narrative of former slave Anna Baker, whose words were transcribed in the Federal Writers’ Project. Anna Baker’s mother was called Harriet Clemens. One time, her mother run off and left her
children behind. Baker recalled how she does not remember much about it, since she was still little, but her mother explained it to her later. The reason why she fled was because of the overseers: “Dey kep’ a-trying to mess ‘round’ with her an’ she wouldn’ havae nothin’ to do wid ‘em.” When she was in the field one time and the overseer asked Anna Baker’s mother to go over to the woods with him, she said: “‘All right, I’ll go find a nice place an’ wait.’” In reality however, she “swum de river an’ run away. She slipped back onct or twict at night to see us, but dat was all.”65
The mother of Anna Baker resisted the overseers’ attempts of sexual abuse by running away. As she responded to the overseer that she would “go find a nice place an’ wait,” she turned the power dynamics around and made herself, by using trickery and cunning, an agent in a setting where the overseer normally exercises control. Her actions demonstrate power and courage, not only because she tricked the overseer, but also because she secretly visited
62 Sam and Louisa Everett, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United
States of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 3, 127-28. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.030/?sp=129
63 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 86. 64 Camp, Closer to Freedom, 62.
65 Anna Baker, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United States of
America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. 7, part 2, 13. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mesn.001/?st=list.
her children once or twice at night, risking her own life. Reflecting on Herriet Clemens’ choices, Fox-Genovese surmises that she could “rely upon the cohesiveness of the slave community to provide a stable world for her children, but she could not tolerate the sexual abuses to herself.”66 While it is true that Harriet Clemens could possibly not deal with the enduring effects of sexual abuse in respect to her own body, it is a mistake to believe that her children would be left behind in a stable world. The slave community would possibly look after her adolescents, but it is far from self-evident that the slave community would have been able to protect them from instabilities and systematic abuses.
An unnamed former slave from Georgia recalled how one of the overseers on a neighboring plantation had caught his eye on “a pretty gal” and how he was “crazy about her.” The mother of the girl had told her “not to let any of ‘em go with her.” It seemed that the girl followed her mother’s advice, but as a result, the overseer “would stick close ‘round her when they was working’, just so he could get a chance to say somethin’ to her.” He kept following her until “she almost went crazy.” She eventually decided to run away, through which she “come to our house and stayed ‘bout three days.” When the master of that household found out that the girl was hiding at his plantation, he send her away. She then stayed in the woods “until she got so hungry that she just had to go back.”67 These lines show that the slave girl refused to accept the overseer’s control and dominance over her. Since she knew with some certainty that the sexual harassment would eventually lead to sexually abuse, she ran away. The slave girl broke out of the invisible power-dynamic circle between her and her overseer, where his power dominated.
No slave women has documented her sexually exploitative experiences more than Harriet Jacobs. The relationship between Jacobs and her master Dr. James Norcom, whom she refers to as Dr. Flint, was manipulative. He in fact recognized her as his own property. Even though he never allowed anyone to hurt Jacobs, he also promised her that he would never sell her, which accentuated his desired control over her. When he started to “whisper foul words in my ear” and decided to build Jacobs a house, she began to realize that Dr. Flint had started, what the scholar Melissa Daniels-Rauterkus calls, his own “sexual game” with her.68
66 Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, 323.
67 Ex-slave from Georgia, in Federal Writers’ Project (FWP), Slave Narratives: A Folk History of the United
States of America From Interviews with Former Slaves. Typewritten records prepared by the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, vol. IV, part 4, 292. https://memory.loc.gov/mss/mesn/044/044.pdf
68 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 30; Melissa Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and
Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Women’s Studies 48, no. 5 (2019): 1. The term “sexual game” which Daniel-Rauterkus uses is interesting. The term makes it easier to visualize the
Jacobs understood that she had to devise “a shrewd sexual counterattack to sabotage her enslaver’s plan.”69 To circumvent Dr. Flint’s obsessive desires, Jacobs initiated a relationship with a white lawyer named Samuel Tredwell Sawyer. She refers to him in her autobiography as Mr. Sands and describes him as a “a man of more generosity and feeling than my master.”70 Because she was “desperate” and “shuddered to think of being the mother of children that should be owned by my old tyrant,” Jacobs chose to become impregnated by Mr. Sands, rather than by her own master.71 When her baby was born, Dr. Flint continued to visit her, to both check on her health and to remind her that her child was “an addition to his stock of slaves.”72 This accentuates Dr. Flint’s obsession with reproduction and his claim to her body. One of the most significant sections in Jacobs’ narrative is her elucidation of why she decided to enter into a relationship with Mr. Sands:
I knew the impassable gulf between us; but to be an object of interest to a man who is not married, and who is not her master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable situation has left her any pride or sentiment. It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.73
This passage evokes that Jacobs had the opportunity of making a selective choice. Rather than putting Mr. Sands in a bad light, Jacobs uses the words “impassable gulf” to describe her relationship with him. Jacobs refers to herself as “an object of interest”: “object” might be a deliberate word choice in this, because it dehumanizes. By writing that starting a relationship with a man who is not married and not her master “is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable situation has left her any pride and sentiment,” Jacobs not only explicitly expresses her feelings, but also truly indicates that one of the horrors of
enslavement is its debasement of the individual. It is significant that Jacobs describes her
conversations between Jacobs and her master. Daniels-Rauterkus does not explicitly define the term. Nonetheless, she clearly states that the term belongs to Dr. Flint’s perception and not to Jacobs her views. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “game” can hint at a pleasurable or a leisure-based activity, or at a manipulative strategy. Both definitions of these terms can be applied to Dr. Flint’s behaviour. But while “sexual game” is applicable to his perspective, Daniels-Rauterkus fails to explain that, from Jacobs her view, this was severe sexual harassment. See “Game, n.,” in OED Online (Oxford University Press), 2020,
http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/76466.
69 Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl,” 3.
70 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 61. 71 Jacobs, 61.
72 Jacobs, 68. 73 Jacobs, 61.
option as “less degrading.” In this way, she underlines that both options, a relationship with her master or with another white man, are demeaning. By writing that there is “something akin to freedom” rather than just “freedom,” Jacobs not only contemplates that she may never know what freedom feels like, as she acknowledges that she might never be sold by her own master, but also accentuates that the option was strategic and, in fact, self-controlling.
While it must be acknowledged that both options for Jacobs reveal the horrors of enslavement, analyzing these lines reveals that Jacobs had agency over a particular moment and decision in her life. Jacobs’ act to start a relationship with Mr. Sands can be perceived as a selective choice. The word selective is important, since it emphasizes the argument that slaves could be both agents and victims at the same time. Her selective choice suggests that there is no indication that she would have made this decision to have sexual intercourse and conceive a child were it not for the heavily constrained, and cruel, realities of her
circumstances. Nonetheless, agency is reflected in Jacobs decision to give her body sexually to a man who is kind to her, rather than to let her master sexually abuse her.
Melissa Daniel-Rauterkus, too, recognizes agency in this passage, arguing that Jacobs “translates her body into a political instrument, of sorts, to engage in a form of civil
resistance to slavery.”74 Here, she provides evidence that Jacobs’ participation in Dr. Flint’s sexual endeavors requires to make a premediated bid to become pregnant by another man, thereby asserting a degree of “procreative agency.”75 Daniels-Rauterkus argues that Jacobs possesses agency due to her ability to choose. However, this argument is problematic. Daniels-Rauterkus minimizes the horrific context Jacobs found herself in. Jacobs decision is better described as a “survival strategy,” by Dana-Ain Davis, a professor in urban studies.76 Davis acknowledges that Jacobs relationship with Mr. Sands “appears to be one into which she entered of her own accord,” but that “it is difficult to embrace the characterization that a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl ‘chose’ to have sex with an older white man.”77 Her decision, in short, tells us as much about the realities of slavery as it does about the possibility of agency and enslavement.
74 Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl,” 1.
75 Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl,” 1.
76 Dana-Ain Davis. Reproductive Injustice: Racism, Pregnancy, and Premature Birth (New York: New York
University Press, 2019), 30.
Daniels-Rauterkus describes Jacobs actions as “a calculated ploy” and a “victory.”78 She analyses Jacobs decision in the light of women empowerment and praises Jacobs for winning the game. Overall, she attempts to convey the message that Jacobs is the “victor, and not the victim, of sexual exploitation.”79 By making this argument, Daniels-Rauterkus denies the horrors of the scene. Even though she acknowledges that “this is a victory within the context of her enslavement,” can Jacobs be awarded for winning this “game?”80 It can be questioned whether Jacobs can be considered an active player in this game after all when considering her involuntary participation. Considering the fact that games are, most of the time, held for entertainment purposes, this situation should explicitly not be recognized as a competition. Daniels-Rauterkus her fault lies in not properly defining the terms she uses. Terms as “victor,” “calculated ploy,” and “game” become ambiguous as a result of the horrific context. Daniels-Rauterkus fails to accurately describe the circumstances that drove Jacobs to implement a strategy. As a result, Daniel-Rauterkus falls into the trap where she excessively gives Jacobs back her agency. She explicitly does this when she states that Jacobs was the “victor, and not the victim, of sexual exploitation.”81 This argument is exactly the type of historical redress that Johnson warned for. Jacobs was clearly both the victor and the victim of sexual exploitation. She exercised agency by choosing the only alternative option that she had, but this form of power only appeared in a context where the horrors of slavery – as sexual exploitation – should not be ignored.
Claiming Agency Through Words
An important example of Jacobs asserting her agency lies in her choice of
self-presentation. Before it can be addressed why this is the case, it is first necessary to look at the nineteenth-century prevailing value system in the United States among the upper and middle classes: The Cult of True Womanhood. The four attributes of True Womanhood were piety, purity, submissiveness an domesticity and together, these virtues form the ideal of a typical Victorian lady. 82 When Jacobs wrote her narrative, she decided which stories to tell, and
78 Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl,” 6.
79 Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl,” 2.
80 Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl,” 2.
81Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” 2.
82 Piety referred to religion which was often considered the core of women’s virtue. Purity related to virginity.
Women were meant to keep their purity. Submission meant that women had to be obedient, where men were, in fact, superior to women. Domesticity was related to the home.
what information was better to keep hidden. While this might seem easy on the surface, Jacobs had to make a strategic choice. She had to decide whether to tell the truth, but possibly harm her own self-image, since she was not able to follow the virtues imposed on women who believed in the typical Victorian lady narrative, or whether to keep silent on these issues. Jacobs chose the former.
Rather than following the conventions of nineteenth century discourse of true womanhood, Jacobs made the decision to reject these Victorian principles for a strategic goal: to elucidate the true horrors of the slavery system.83 She does not appear to shy away from intimate details of her enslavement. In her introduction, Jacobs confesses “I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery.”84 When she was fifteen years old, she experienced sexual actions which destroyed the “pure principles inculcated by my grandmother.”85 She introduces this period in her life by stating “And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could. The remembrance fills me with sorrow and shame. It pains me to tell you of it; but I have promised to tell you the truth, and I will do it honestly, let it cost me what it may.”86 By sharing the horrific consequences of the notion that black women are not pure, Jacobs “challenges the norms of white motherhood.”87 In addition, by stating that Dr. Flint “tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled,” Jacobs emphasizes that slavery is degenerative and decadent because the institution destabilizes gender norms 88
Since Jacobs decided which story to tell, she possessed the power over her own self-representation. Jacobs authorship is in itself a form of resistance: she exerted agency through her deliberate strategy to challenge the Cult of True Womanhood in her narrative. Jacobs aims to make her readers understand that the slavery system was the utter cause why black women could not adhere to these dominating virtues and believes. Through sharing her experiences, however horrific these were, Jacobs verbally turned her body into a political entity and expressed that the bodily sufferings of slave women were not because they did not
83 Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl,” 2.
84 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 60. 85 Jacobs, 60.
86 Jacobs, 59-60.
87 Daniels–Rauterkus, “Civil Resistance and Procreative Agency in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a
Slave Girl,” 5.
respect the Victorian principles, but rather because external powers – their slaveowners – obstructed their attempts to adhere to them.
Asserting Agency Through Silence
In contrast to Jacobs, Sojourner Truth endorsed the Cult of True Womanhood, but was able to exert agency nevertheless. Truth did not share her experiences, especially sexual actions, as openly in The Narrative of Sojourner Truth.89 But, Truth was confronted with sexual exploitation and abuse nevertheless. Interpreting these sexual experiences however requires reading between the lines. Historians have dismissed her experience for a number of reasons: Truth was a northern rather than a southern slave; her narrative was dictated; and because she was not open about her sexual encounters, which made her narrative too pure for a slave woman.90 While her narrative has previously been overlooked and criticized, these critiques failed to detect the hidden meaning in Truth’s words.
While Truth never talks about sexual abuse, several scholars are convinced that she had a master-slave sex relationship with her fourth master, John Dumont. Ostensibly, Truth was able to get along quite well with Dumont, whom she described as a “humane master.”91 However, she had a troublesome relationship with his wife, Elizabeth Dumont. During her life at the Dumont plantation, Truth fell in love with Robert, a slave from a neighboring farm. They only had a short relationship, however. Later, Truth married an enslaved man called Thomas, who was also a slave at the Dumont plantation. What is known from Truth’s narrative is that she had five children, of which two were born before she was together with Thomas. A lot of secrecy exists on the question who fathered these two babies. While it is possible that Robert was the father of one of her offspring, many scholars suggest that John Dumont could also have been the father of at least one of her children. Truth’s first two children were James, who died in infancy, and Diana. The fact that John Dumont fathered either James or Diana is, according to historian Margaret Washington, a strong probability, since it explains Elizabeth Dumont’s hatred towards Truth and why she abused Truth’s children.92
89 Sojourner Truth and Olive Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth; a Bondswoman of Olden Time, Emancipated by the New York Legislature in the Early Part of the Present Century; with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence, Drawn from Her “Book of Life,” ed. Frances W. Titus (Boston, 1875),
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/truth75/truth75.html.
90 Margaret Washington. “‘From Motives of Delicacy’: Sexuality and Morality in the Narratives of Sojourner
Truth and Harriet Jacobs,” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (2007): 58.
91 Truth and Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 124. 92 Washington, “‘From Motives of Delicacy,’” 63.
While sexual exploitation is not openly spoken of in Truth’s narrative, the following excerpt hints at the possibly that this might have happened:
There are some hard things that crossed Isabella's life while in slavery, that she has no desire to publish, for various reasons. First, because the parties from whose hands she suffered them have rendered up their account to a higher tribunal, and their innocent friends alone are living, to have their feelings injured by the recital; secondly, because they are not all for the public ear, from their very nature…93 A close reading between the lines suggests in this case that Gilbert, the writer of Truth’s narrative, hints at sexual abuse when referring to “hard things,” “that she has no desire to publish” and “they are not all for the public ear, from their very nature.” These sentences emphasize not only that the subject of sexuality was taboo, but also that exposing Truth’s experiences in relation to sexuality might harm Truth’s image – or even offend the target audience.
It is significant that Jacobs wrote a contrasting but similar section when she introduced that she was going to share information that might be harmful to her readers. While Jacobs wrote “And now, reader, I come to a period in my unhappy life, which I would gladly forget if I could,” Truth shares a similar announcement of a sensitive topic but
regarding a different content: “There are some hard things that crossed Isabella’s life while in slavery, that she has no desire to publish, for various reasons.”94 While Jacobs ought it
necessary to share her experiences, even though this could possibly damage her honor, Truth decided to stay silent on this topic due to her embracement of Victorian moralities.
Earlier in the narrative, Gilbert wrote another paragraph that signifies a similar message:
From this source arose a long series of trials in the life of our heroine, which we must pass over in silence; some, from the motives of delicacy, and others, because the relation of them might inflict underserved pain on some now living, whom Isabel remembers only with esteem and love.95
Gilbert referred to Truth as a “heroine,” – a deliberate word choice which implies Truth’s sensitivity for self-appearance. “From the motives of delicacy” hints at certain matters of sexuality. Rather than harming her public image, Truth hints at a sexual experience without
93 Truth and Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 81-82.
94 Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 59-60: Truth and Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 81-82. 95 Truth and Gilbert, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, 30.
using discomforting words and imagery.While Truth’s word choice was ambiguous, it did not question her authenticity.
In contrast to Jacobs, Truth chose not to share her experiences about sexual abuse. This makes it impossible to consider whether she resisted any of these actions. Truth’s agency however is reflected in something else: her deliberate choice to keep silent on sexual acquaintances. She set the agenda in her conversations with Gilbert. Truth told Gilbert what she wanted her readers to know about her and what information she rather preferably kept hidden. Truth was “an active agent” in deciding on the content of her own narrative.96 This can be considered a form of resistance, since it demonstrates that, even though the slavery institution itself made it impossible for Truth to adhere to the Victorian principles, she reclaimed this power by keeping her narrative pure.
The Power of Words and Silence
Although presenting two contrasting forms of the autobiographical self, Jacobs and Truth both express agency through their choice of self-representation. Where Jacobs decided to exercise her agency by choosing to openly share her sexual encounters, also in horrific detail, Truth practiced agency by staying silent over these matters – on the grounds that she preferred to stay true to her moral values and protect her female honor. Both Jacobs and Truth were able to set the agenda, as they themselves decided what information they would expose in their narrative. While Jacobs chose for a vocal expression, Truth demonstrated that silence can be just as loud.
Chapter 2: “I Was as Cool as I Now Am”: Abortion and Infanticide as Methods of Resistance
On a snowy night in Kentucky, in January 1856, the mulatto plantation slave Margaret Garner and her family began their planned escape. They ran away from the horrific
conditions on the plantation they were living. When they crossed the frozen Ohio River and headed to Cincinnati, they stopped for a while at the house of a free black man named Elijah Kite. He was supposed to help them reach the next station of the Underground railroad, through which they could flee to the North. Soon however, Garner’s slave owner discovered that his slaves had fled. He gathered together with neighboring slaveowners and the federal marshal, followed Garner and her family, and soon caught eye of the fugitives at Kite’s house. They surrounded the house and demanded the slaves to surrender. Right before the slaves were captured, Garner found a butcher knife in the kitchen of the house, with which she walked to her three-year-old daughter Mary and brutally cut her throat. She then moved on to her other daughter and tried to kill her as well by stabbing and striking her in the face with a shovel. Her attempt was unsuccessful however, and before Garner was able to kill all of her children, she was captured and send to prison.97
The trial of Margaret Garner lasted for more than two weeks and was considered one of the longest fugitive slave trials in history.98 Garner confessed during her court case that she would rather have her children death than let them return to slavery. Her story left antebellum America with the question “Was slavery a fate worse than death?”99 While North America tried to find an answer to that question, Garner’s story in the meantime began to circulate as one of the most aggressive and impulsive slave stories in history. Ultimately, Garner became
the symbol of female slave infanticide, referenced in contemporary popular culture. A
famous example is the recreation of her story in Tony Morison’s novel Beloved.100 While, over time, Garner was characterized as a rebel and hero at best, and as a slave suffering from
97 Julius Yanuck. “The Garner Fugitive Slave Case.” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 40:1 (1953):
47-66. See also Rebecca Carroll, “Margaret Garner, a Runaway Slave Who Killed Her Own Daughter,” The New York Times (The New York Times, February 1, 2019).
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/obituaries/margaret-garner-overlooked.html; “The Slave Tragedy in Cincinnati.” New York Daily Times, 1856, ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index.
98 Rebecca Carroll, “Margaret Garner, a Runaway Slave Who Killed Her Own Daughter,” 2019. 99 Rebecca Carroll, “Margaret Garner, a Runaway Slave Who Killed Her Own Daughter,” 2019.
100 Garner’s story inspired Morison to write Beloved for she deemed it a shame that Garner’s voice had never
been heard. The publishing of Morrison’s novel brought about a renaissance of Garner’s story. The protagonist Sethe in Beloved resembles Margaret Garner. They share many characteristics: Sethe is also a fugitive, and eventually kills her daughter Beloved because she refused to let her return to slavery. See Toni Morrison,
