Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire by Trevor Burnard

Author:Trevor Burnard [Burnard, Trevor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2004-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

Sex and Social Control

White men molested slave women in part because they could do so without fear of social consequence and in part because they constantly needed to show slaves the extent of their dominance. The institutional dominance of white men had to be translated into personal dominance. Slave owners needed to show that they were strong, violent, virile men who ruled the little kingdoms of white autocracy that were Jamaican plantations as they pleased. What better way for white men to show who was in control than for them to have the pick of black women whenever they chose? What black men and women thought of these transgressions can only be surmised, but they could not have accepted such violations of their sexual autonomy with equanimity. On occasion, they took revenge. Thistlewood reported, as we have seen, that slaves murdered his former subordinate, Harry McCormick, “for meddling with their women.”67 The already strife-torn fabric of slave community life was further weakened by white men’s continual sexual exploitation of slave women. Sexual relations between black women and white men made dramatically clear not only the powerlessness of blacks against white dominance and white exploitation but also the differences between the experiences of men and women in enslavement. Men faced physical punishment; women faced the same punishment as well as the additional burden of having to provide sexual services to white men.

Thistlewood was probably a rapist in deed. He was certainly a rapist in thought. He harbored attitudes concerning the sexual exploitation of black women that were deplorable, even for men of his time and place. He related, for example, a story from a Mr. Banton about “ye Barb[ados] woman that was rap’d by three of them (at Kingston) in a short space, he ye Middle one yet she laid ye Bastard Child to him and how he made her explain herself.”68 A gang-rape of a black woman was only cause for comment when there was a story attached to it. Thistlewood made it clear to female slaves who were caught transgressing that they could avoid punishment by having sex with him. On 1 February 1753, Clara was “wanting” all afternoon. On her arrival home, Thistlewood promptly had sex with her “by the Coffee Tree.” On 16 September 1753, he had sex with “Waadah in the Still House sup floor,” having found her there, “runaway I suppose.” Refusing to have sex with Thistlewood was not a realistic option. Clara and Waadah knew they had to submit to his sexual demands or else receive physical punishment—punishment that may have been more severe as the result of their refusals.

Black women’s capacity to resist the sexual advances of white men was extremely limited, as the following accounts show. On 12 March 1755, Thistlewood noted that his employer, John Cope, brought a party of six men to the Egypt estate, where they caroused. Late in the evening, “all except Cope and one other, after being heartily drunk, haw’led Eve separately into the Water Room and were Concern’d with her[.

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