Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  IV

  The oppression of slave women had to assume dimensions of open counterinsurgency. Against the background of the facts presented above, it would be difficult indeed to refute this contention. As for those who engaged in open battle, they were no less ruthlessly punished than slave men. It would even appear that in many cases they may have suffered penalties that were more excessive than those meted out to the men. On occasion, when men were hanged, the women were burned alive. If such practices were widespread, their logic would be clear. They would be terrorist methods designed to dissuade other black women from following the examples of their fighting sisters. If all black women rose up alongside their men, the institution of slavery would be in difficult straits.

  It is against the backdrop of her role as fighter that the routine oppression of the slave woman must be explored once more. If she was burned, hanged, broken on the wheel, her head paraded on poles before her oppressed brothers and sisters, she must have also felt the edge of this counterinsurgency as a fact of her daily existence. The slave system would not only have to make conscious efforts to stifle the tendencies towards acts of the kind described above; it would be no less necessary to stave off escape attempts (escapes to Maroon country!) and all the various forms of sabotage within the system. Feigning illness was also resistance as were work slowdowns and actions destructive to the crops. The more extensive these acts, the more the slaveholder’s profits would tend to diminish.

  While a detailed study of the myriad modes in which this counterinsurgency was manifested can and should be conducted, the following reflections will focus on a single aspect of the slave woman’s oppression, particularly prominent in its brutality.

  Much has been said about the sexual abuses to which the black woman was forced to submit. They are generally explained as an outgrowth of the male supremacy of Southern culture: the purity of white womanhood could not be violated by the aggressive sexual activity desired by the white male. His instinctual urges would find expression in his relationships with his property—the black slave woman, who would have to become his unwilling concubine. No doubt there is an element of truth in these statements, but it is equally important to unearth the meaning of these sexual abuses from the vantage point of the woman who was assaulted.

  In keeping with the theme of these reflections, it will be submitted that the slave master’s sexual domination of the black woman contained an unveiled element of counterinsurgency. To understand the basis for this assertion, the dialectical moments of the slave woman’s oppression must be restated and their movement recaptured. The prime factor, it has been said, was the total and violent expropriation of her labor with no compensation save the pittance necessary for bare existence.

  Secondly, as female, she was the housekeeper of the living quarters. In this sense, she was already doubly oppressed. However, having been wrested from passive, “feminine” existence by the sheer force of things—literally by forced labor—confining domestic tasks were incommensurable with what she had become. That is to say, by virtue of her participation in production, she would not act the part of the passive female, but could experience the same need as her men to challenge the conditions of her subjugation. As the center of domestic life, the only life at all removed from the arena of exploitation, and thus as an important source of survival, the black woman could play a pivotal role in nurturing the thrust towards freedom.

  The slave master would attempt to thwart this process. He knew that as a female, this slave woman could be particularly vulnerable in her sexual existence. Although he would not pet her and deck her out in frills, the white master could endeavor to reestablish her femaleness by reducing her to the level of her biological being. Aspiring with his sexual assaults to establish her as a female animal, he would be striving to destroy her proclivities towards resistance. Of the sexual relations of animals, taken at their abstract biological level (and not in terms of their quite different social potential for human beings), Simone de Beauvoir says the following:It is unquestionably the male who takes the female—she is taken. Often the word applies literally, for whether by means of special organs or through superior strength, the male seizes her and holds her in place; he performs the copulatory movements; and, among insects, birds, and mammals, he penetrates ... Her body becomes a resistance to be broken through . . .39

  The act of copulation, reduced by the white man to an animal-like act, would be symbolic of the effort to conquer the resistance the black woman could unloose.

  In confronting the black woman as adversary in a sexual contest, the master would be subjecting her to the most elemental form of terrorism distinctively suited for the female: rape. Given the already terroristic texture of plantation life, it would be as potential victim of rape that the slave woman would be most unguarded. Further, she might be most conveniently manipulable if the master contrived a ransom system of sorts, forcing her to pay with her body for food, diminished severity in treatment, the safety of her children, etc.

  The integration of rape into the sparsely furnished legitimate social life of the slaves harks back to the feudal “right of the first night,” the jus primae noctis. The feudal lord manifested and reinforced his domination over the serfs by asserting his authority to have sexual intercourse with all the females. The right itself referred specifically to all freshly married women. But while the right to the first night eventually evolved into the institutionalized “virgin tax,”40 the American slaveholder’s sexual domination never lost its openly terroristic character.

  As a direct attack on the black female as potential insurgent, this sexual repression finds its parallels in virtually every historical situation where the woman actively challenges oppression. Thus, Frantz Fanon could say of the Algerian woman: “A woman led away by soldiers who comes back a week later—it is not necessary to question her to understand that she has been violated dozens of times.”41

  In its political contours, the rape of the black woman was not exclusively an attack upon her. Indirectly, its target was also the slave community as a whole. In launching the sexual war on the woman, the master would not only assert his sovereignty over a critically important figure of the slave community, he would also be aiming a blow against the black man. The latter’s instinct to protect his female relations and comrades (now stripped of its male supremacist implications) would be frustrated and violated to the extreme. Placing the white male’s sexual barbarity in bold relief, Du Bois cries out in a rhetorical vein:I shall forgive the South much in its final judgment day: I shall forgive its slavery, for slavery is a world-old habit; I shall forgive its fighting for a welllost cause, and for remembering that struggle with tender tears; I shall forgive its so-called pride of race, the passion of its hot blood, and even its dear, old, laughable strutting and posing; but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world nor the world to come: its wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust.42

  The retaliatory import of the rape for the black man would be entrapment in an untenable situation. Clearly the master hoped that once the black man was struck by his manifest inability to rescue his women from sexual assaults of the master, he would begin to experience deep-seated doubts about his ability to resist at all.

  Certainly the wholesale rape of slave women must have had a profound impact on the slave community. Yet it could not succeed in its intrinsic aim of stifling the impetus towards struggle. Countless black women did not passively submit to these abuses, as the slaves in general refused to passively accept their bondage. The struggles of the slave woman in the sexual realm were a continuation of the resistance interlaced in the slave’s daily existence. As such, this was yet another form of insurgency, a response to a politically tinged sexual repression.

  Even E. Franklin Frazier (who goes out of his way to defend the thesis that “the master in his mansion and his colored mistress in her special house nearby represented the final triump
h of social ritual in the presence of the deepest feelings of human solidarity”)43 could not entirely ignore the black woman who fought back. He notes: “That physical compulsion was necessary at times to secure submission on the part of black women . . . is supported by historical evidence and has been preserved in the tradition of Negro families.”44

  The sexual contest was one of many arenas in which the black woman had to prove herself as a warrior against oppression. What Frazier unwillingly concedes would mean that countless children brutally fathered by whites were conceived in the thick of battle. Frazier himself cites the story of a black woman whose great-grandmother, a former slave, would describe with great zest the battles behind all her numerous scars—that is, all save one. In response to questions concerning the unexplained scar, she had always simply said: “White men are as low as dogs, child, stay away from them.” The mystery was not unveiled until after the death of this brave woman: “She received that scar at the hands of her master’s youngest son, a boy of about eighteen years at the time she conceived their child, my grandmother Ellen.”45

  An intricate and savage web of oppression intruded at every moment into the black woman’s life during slavery. Yet a single theme appears at every juncture: the woman transcending, refusing, fighting back, asserting herself over and against terrifying obstacles. It was not her comrade brother against whom her incredible strength was directed. She fought alongside her man, accepting or providing guidance according to her talents and the nature of their tasks. She was in no sense an authoritarian figure; neither her domestic role nor her acts of resistance could relegate the man to the shadows. On the contrary, she herself had just been forced to leave behind the shadowy realm of female passivity in order to assume her rightful place beside the insurgent male.

  This portrait cannot, of course, presume to represent every individual slave woman. It is rather a portrait of the potentials and possibilities inherent in the situation to which slave women were anchored. Invariably there were those who did not realize this potential. There were those who were indifferent and a few who were outright traitors. But certainly they were not the vast majority. The image of black women enchaining their men, cultivating relationships with the oppressor, is a cruel fabrication that must be called by its right name. It is a dastardly ideological weapon designed to impair our capacity for resistance today by foisting upon us the ideal of male supremacy.

  According to a time-honored principle, advanced by Marx, Lenin, Fanon, and numerous other theorists, the status of women in any given society is a barometer measuring the overall level of social development. As Fanon has masterfully shown, the strength and efficacy of social struggles —and especially revolutionary movements—bear an immediate relationship to the range and quality of female participation.

  The meaning of this principle is strikingly illustrated by the role of the black woman during slavery. Attendant to the indiscriminate, brutal pursuit of profit, the slave woman attained a correspondingly brutal status of equality. But in practice, she could work up a fresh content for this deformed equality by inspiring and participating in acts of resistance of every form and color. She could turn the weapon of equality in struggle against the avaricious slave system that had engendered the mere caricature of equality in oppression. The black woman’s activities increased the total incidence of antislavery assaults. But most important, without consciously rebellious black women, the theme of resistance could not have become so thoroughly intertwined in the fabric of daily existence. The status of black women within the community of slaves was definitely a barometer indicating the overall potential for resistance.

  This process did not end with the formal dissolution of slavery. Under the impact of racism, the black woman has been continually constrained to inject herself into the desperate struggle for existence. She—like her man —has been compelled to work for wages, providing for her family as she was previously forced to provide for the slaveholding class. The infinitely onerous nature of this equality should never be overlooked. For the black woman has always also remained harnessed to the chores of the household. Yet, she could never be exhaustively defined by her uniquely “female” responsibilities.

  As a result, black women have made significant contributions to struggles against the racism and the dehumanizing exploitation of a wrongly organized society. In fact, it would appear that the intense levels of resistance historically maintained by black people and thus the historical function of the black liberation struggle as harbinger of change throughout the society are due in part to the greater objective equality between the black man and the black woman. Du Bois put it this way:In the great rank and file of our five million women, we have the upworking of new revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on the thought and action of this land.46

  Official and unofficial attempts to blunt the effects of the egalitarian tendencies as between the black man and woman should come as no surprise. The matriarch concept, embracing the clichéd “female castrator,” is, in the last instance, an open weapon of ideological warfare. Black men and women alike remain its potential victims—men unconsciously lunging at the woman, equating her with the myth; women sinking back into the shadows, lest an aggressive posture resurrect the myth in themselves.

  The myth must be consciously repudiated as myth, and the black woman in her true historical contours must be resurrected. We, the black women of today, must accept the full weight of a legacy wrought in blood by our mothers in chains. Our fight, while identical in spirit, reflects different conditions and thus implies different paths of struggle. But as heirs to a tradition of supreme perseverance and heroic resistance, we must hasten to take our place wherever our people are forging on towards freedom.

  ENDNOTES

  1 It is interesting to note a parallel in Nazi Germany: with all its ranting and raving about motherhood and the family, Hitler’s regime made a conscious attempt to strip the family of virtually all its social functions. The thrust of their unspoken program for the family was to reduce it to a biological unit and to force its members to relate in an unmediated fashion to the fascist bureaucracy. Clearly the Nazis endeavored to crush the family in order to ensure that it could not become a center from which oppositional activity might originate.

  2 Herbert Aptheker, ed., A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (New York: Citadel Press, 1969), 272.

  3 Andrew Billingsley, Black Families in White America (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), 61.

  4 John Henrik Clarke, “The Black Woman: A Figure in World History,” Essence (July 1971).

  5 Karl Marx, Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), 389. [Davis’s translation. Ed.]

  6 Friedrich Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (New York: International Publishers, 1942), 107.

  7 Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Collier Books, 1962), 96.

  8 W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater, Voices from Within the Veil (New York: AMS Press, 1969), 185.

  9 Lewis Clarke, Narrative of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke, Sons of a Soldier of the Revolution (Boston: 1846), 127 [Quoted by E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States].

  10 Moses Grandy, Narrative of the Life of Moses Grandy; Late a Slave in the United States of America (Boston: 1844), 18 [Quoted by Frazier].

  11 Ibid.

  12 Marx, Grundrisse, 266. [Davis’s translation. Ed.]

  13 Earl Conrad, “I Bring You General Tubman,” Black Scholar 1 nos. 3–4 (January/February 1970): 4.

  14 In February, 1949, Herbert Aptheker published an essay in Masses and Mainstream entitled “The Negro Woman.” As yet, however, I have been unable to obtain it.

  15 Herbert Aptheker, “Slave Guerrilla Warfare” in To Be Free, Studies in American Negro History (New York: International Publishers, 1969), 11.

  16 Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (New York: International Pu
blishers, 1970), 169.

  17 Ibid., 173.

  18 Ibid., 181.

  19 Ibid., 182.

  20 Ibid., 190.

  21 Ibid., 145.

  22 Ibid., 201.

  23 Ibid., 207.

  24 Ibid., 215.

  25 Ibid., 239.

  26 Ibid., 241–242.

  27 Ibid., 247.

  28 Ibid., 251.

  29 Aptheker, Documentary History, 55–57.

  30 Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 259.

  31 Ibid., 277.

  32 Ibid., 259.

  33 Ibid., 281.

  34 Ibid., 487.

  35 Aptheker, “Guerrilla Warfare,” 27.

  36 Aptheker, Slave Revolts, 342.

  37 Aptheker, “Guerrilla Warfare,” 28.

  38 Ibid., 29.

  39 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 18–19.

  40 August Bebel, Women and Socialism (New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1910), 66–69.

  41 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove, 1967), 119.

  42 Du Bois, Darkwater, 172.

  43 E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 69.

  44 Ibid., 53.

  45 Ibid., 53–54.

  46 Du Bois, Darkwater, 185.

  Michele Wallace (1952—)

  Michele Wallace, born in Harlem and the daughter of feminist artist Faith Ringgold, was a founding member of the National Black Feminist Organization (1974). She is best known for the controversial feminist polemic she wrote in her twenties—Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1978)—which is a critique of the male-dominant civil rights and misogynistic Black Power movements, and a scathing expose of sexual politics within the African American community. She also debunked the myth of black women as “superwomen” who have no need for feminism. Black Macho generated a storm of criticism within the black community, including among black feminists such as June Jordan and Gloria Joseph. In her introduction to the new edition of Black Macho, entitled “How I Saw It Then, How I See It Now” (London: Verso, 1990) Wallace provides her own critique of the book, which twelve years earlier sparked a major debate within the black community. “Anger in Isolation” appeared in the Village Voice four years before Macho and explains why she became a feminist and how difficult it was for a young black woman in the early years. Wallace, a prolific cultural critic, is presently a member of the faculty at CUNY where she teaches women’s studies and film studies. Her recent publications include Invisibility Blues (1990) and Black Popular Culture (1992), edited by Gina Dent, the proceedings of a conference at The Studio Museum in Harlem, December 8-10, 1991, which Wallace convened.