Freedom's Seekers by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie

Author:Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie [Kerr-Ritchie, Jeffrey R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Slavery, History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Africa, General
ISBN: 9780807154717
Google: eqrYCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2014-04-16T05:15:07+00:00

III. FREER BODIES

Although slave-owners denied it, abolitionists implied it, and the evidence remains elusive, enslaved women were frequently the victims of various forms of domestic violence and sexual exploitation by slave-owners, overseers, drivers, and even non-slaveholders. The category of “mulatto”—either in official census returns or as a racial descriptor in civil society—throughout slave societies in the Americas testified to slave-owners’ power over the bodies of slave women. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s description of social relations in the plantation U.S. South has a broader spatial and temporal relevance: “Despite occasional examples of tenderness and loyalty between masters and slave concubines, the masters’ unchecked power over their slave women brought into the center of the household that public violence against which white women were protected.”61 Although some scholars have argued for “pronounced differences” between slave women in North America and the Caribbean, suggesting that not all concubines were sexually exploited in the latter region, it remains the case that the bodies of slave women were the legal property of slave-owners in all slave societies and as such could not be sexually abused under existing laws.62 Eddie Donoghue’s study of enslaved women in the Danish West Indies insists that relationships between black women and white men were “coercive” and “pervasive” rather than “consensual” and “romantic.”63

The prevalence of slave women’s sexual abuse across the nineteenth-century Americas is exemplified by three experiences. Mary Prince was enslaved in the British Caribbean, after which her owners brought her to London in 1827. With the aid of white abolitionist benefactors, she narrated her memoirs, subsequently published as The History of Mary Prince in 1831. The memoir is full of brutal beatings, savage whippings, and the incessant physical abuse of enslaved women in Bermuda and elsewhere. The descriptions of domestic violence are plentiful but less so concerning sexual abuse. Mary Prince refers to scenes in which her owner Mr. D. “had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked and ordering me then to wash him in a tub of water.” This seems tame, but she adds: “This was worse to me than all the licks.”64 A generation later, Linda Brent (née Harriet Brent Jacobs) published her memoir Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl in the United States. In chapter 10, “A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life,” Jacobs is a little more overt than Prince in her discussion of how her owner Dr. Flint would “whisper foul words,” and “pollute my mind with foul images.”65 This testimony to slave women’s sexual abuse, however, is rather subtle, perhaps reflecting the mores of slave narratives designed to rally but not offend a bourgeois readership.

Such subtleties were absent in a court case in Recife, Brazil, during the early 1880s. Slave-owner Henrique Ferreira Pontes was accused of “deflowering” his slave Honorata, her age estimated anywhere between twelve and seventeen. The defendant did not deny “he caused the deflowering,” but challenged “the right of the court to take action in a case concerning a slave woman deflowered by her master, and therefore

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