Though black people were less than five percent of the population in the later part of the seventeenth century, a 1662 Virginia statute stipulated that “all offspring follow the condition of the mother in the event of a white man getting a Negro with child.”16 A 1664 statute prohibited all unions between the races.17 In 1665, the first English slave code in New York provided that slavery was for life.18 Colonial law and custom reflected the parameters that would continue to govern American sexual behavior: regardless of who impregnated black women, any offspring would be slave. As Hofstadter puts it, this “guaranteed in a society where interracial sex usually involved the access of white men to black women, that without other provisions to the contrary, the mulatto population would be slave.”19 Well before the institution of slavery was firmly established in the antebellum South during the nineteenth century, these laws and others prohibiting black political participation, ownership of land, and the right to carry arms20 were aimed at creating a black population in perpetual servitude.
Slavery and slaveholders dominated American political and economic life for about two hundred years. As Carl Degler describes it:The labor of slaves provided the wherewithal to maintain lawyers and actors, cotton factors and publishers, musicians in Charleston, senators in Washington, and gamblers on the Mississippi river boats. Slaveholders were agricultural entrepreneurs in a capitalistic society: their central importance as a class resided not in their numbers, which were admittedly small, but in their ability to accumulate surplus for investment.21
Degler’s phrase “ability to accumulate surplus for investment” tends to obscure all traces of the inhumanity of slavery: black women’s bodies were a primary means of accumulating the surplus: “My mother was young—just fifteen or sixteen years old. She had fourteen chillen and you know that meant a lots of wealth.”22 New slave owners with one or two slaves attempting to “construct an initial labor force” and establish an economic base in order to realize profits broke up slave communities or African clans by obtaining individual slaves through purchase, gift, or marriage. The fecundity of black women was key to the slave owner’s goal. Gutman documents that as one planter said, “An owner’s labor force doubled through natural increase every 15 years.”23 A slave, looking back, agrees:They would buy a fine girl and a fine man and just put them together like cattle; they would not stop to marry them. If she was a good breeder, they was proud of her. I was stout and they were saving me for a breeding woman, but by the time I was big enough I was free. I had an aunt in Mississippi and she had about 20 children by her marster.24
“Natural increase” meant that the black woman was encouraged and sometimes forced to have sex frequently in order to have babies whether by black men or white men, in stable or unstable relationships.
But as early as 1639, black women resisted forced sex: [O]ne source ... tells of a Negro woman being held as a slave on Noddles Island in Boston harbor. Her master sought to mate her with another Negro, but, the chronicler reported, she kicked her prospective lover out of bed, saying that such behavior was “beyond her slavery.”25
But though it was beyond her concept of enslavement, it was not beyond her master’s, for every part of the black woman was used by him. To him she was a fragmented commodity whose feelings and choices were rarely considered: her head and her heart were separated from her back and her hands and divided from her womb and vagina. Her back and muscle were pressed into field labor where she was forced to work with men and work like men. Her hands were demanded to nurse and nurture the white man and his family as domestic servant whether she was technically enslaved or legally free. Her vagina, used for his sexual pleasure, was the gateway to the womb, which was his place of capital investment—the capital investment being the sex act, and the resulting child the accumulated surplus, worth money on the slave market.
The totalitarian system of slavery extended itself into the very place that was inviolable and sacred to both African and European societies—the sanctity of the woman’s body and motherhood within the institution of marriage. Although all women were slaves under patriarchy, the particular enslavement of black women was also an attack on all black people. All sexual intercourse between a white man and a black woman irrespective of her conscious consent became rape, because the social arrangement assumed the black woman to be without any human right to control her own body.26 And the body could not be separated from its color.
Racial oppression tends to flow from the external to the internal: from political institutions, social structures, the economic system, and military conquest, into the psyche and consciousness and culture of the oppressed and the oppressor. In contrast, sexual oppression tends to direct itself directly to the internal, the feeling and emotional center, the private and intimate self, existing within the external context of power and social control. Black women fused both racial and sexual oppression in their beings and movements in both black and white worlds.
Black women moved through the white man’s world: through his space, his land, his fields, his streets, and his woodpiles.
The Negro woman carried herself like a queen, tall and stately in spite of her position as a slave. The overseer, the plantation owner’s son, sent her to the house on some errand. It was necessary to pass through a wooded pasture to reach the house, and the overseer intercepted her in the woods and forced her to put her head between the rails in an old stake and rider fence, and there in that position, my great, great grandfather was conceived.27
In the white man’s world, black women would have a place: “I know at least fifty places in my small town were white men are positively raising two families—a white family in the ‘Big House’ in front, and a colored family in a ‘Little House’ in the backyard.”28 In the white man’s world, black women were separated from black men: “When I left the camp my wife had had two children by some one of the white bosses, and she was living in fairly good shape in a little house off to herself.”29 They became the teachers of sex to white boys. “Testimony seems to be quite widespread to the fact that many if not most southern boys begin their sexual experiences with Negro girls.”30
White men tortured and punished black women who refused them: For fending off the advances of an overseer on a Virginia plantation, Minnie Falkes’s mother was suspended from a barn rafter and beaten with a horsewhip “nekkid” til blood run down her back to her heels.31 Madison Jefferson adds:Women who refused to submit themselves to the brutal desires of their owners, are repeatedly whipt to subdue their virtuous repugnance, and in most instances this hellish practice is but too successful—when it fails, the women are frequently sold off to the south.32
The black woman worked in the white man’s home, both before and after formal emancipation. She knew her master/lover as a man; she was intimate with his humanity; she fed him and she slept with him; she ministered to his needs.33 One slave remarked, ”Now mind you all of the colored women didn’t have to have white men, some did it because they wanted to and some were forced. They had a horror of going to Mississippi and they would do anything to keep from it.“34
Black women and white women were sisters under the oppression of white men in whose houses they both lived as servants. In the antebellum South, Mary Chestnut wrote, “There is no slave after all like a wife.”35 A white woman married to the planter/patriarch endured, suffered, and submitted to him in all things. White women, though viewed as pure and delicate ladies by Southern myth, had to serve their husband/masters as did the female servants and slaves; managing the household, entertaining the guests, overseeing the feeding and clothing of both slaves and relatives.36
Both white and black women were physically weakened and often died from birthing too many of the master’s children. White men often had several wives in succession because many died in childbirth. While white wives visited relatives for long periods of time to have space between pregnancies,37 exercising a much-needed control over childbearing, black women all too often filled the gap for both recreation
al and procreational sex. Ann Firor Scott writes of one South Carolinian who thought, “The availability of slave women for sex avoided the horrors of prostitution. He pointed out that men could satisfy their sexual needs while increasing their slave property.”38 To be a white woman in the antebellum South meant accepting the double standard; brothers, fathers, and mates could enjoy sex with her sisters in bondage, black women. White women however, were prevented from enjoying sex because they were viewed as “pure women incapable of erotic feeling.”39
Many southern white women privately disliked the double standard and the horrors of the sexual life it implied: “Under slavery we lived surrounded by prostitutes like patriarchs of old, our men live in one house with their wives and concubines.”40 An ex-slave woman agreed:Just the other day we were talking about white people when they had slaves. You know when a man would marry, his father would give him a woman for a cook, and she would have children right in the home by him, and his wife would have children too. Sometimes the cook’s children favored him so much that the wife would be mean to them and make him sell them.41
Yet for all the private outrage of white women at the “injustice and shame” to all womanhood of the sexual activities of white men, black women stood alone without the support of their sisters. Most white women sadistically and viciously punished the black women and her children for the transgressions of their white men. One study states:To punish black women for minor offenses, mistresses were likely to attack with any weapon available—a fork, butcher knife, knitting needle, pan of boiling water. Some of the most barbaric forms of punishment resulting in the mutilation and permanent scarring of female servants were devised by white mistresses in the heat of passion.42
White women used the social relationship of supervisor of black women’s domestic labor to act out their racial superiority, their emotional frustrations, and their sexual jealousies. Black women slaves and domestic servants were useful buffers between white men and white women, pulling them together, resolving their conflicts, maintaining continuity and structure for the white family whose physical and emotional needs they fulfilled.43
When the daughter and son of the white man and the black woman faced the father, they reflected the fruits of his passion as well as the duplicity of his life. Their light skin or light eyes, their straight hair or nose reflected himself to himself, and yet he still refused to acknowledge paternity. The exceptional white father/master/lover who cared would often free his black children and wife, hustle them out of town, educating and supporting them from afar, helping them rise within black society while hoping for silence and anonymity. But in spite of traditional patriarchal concerns for fatherhood, most white fathers did nothing for their colored children. Most colored children shared the experience of this ex-slave: “My grandfather was an Irishman, and he was a foreman, but he had to whip his children and grandchildren just like the others.”44 Those few slaveholders who loved and respected their slave wives were limited by societal criticism and the law from formally marrying them.45
Though she had no privacy, away from the view of all, could the black woman have ever desired and loved her master/lover? Could she have separated the hands that whipped her body from the hands that gripped her body in lovemaking? After all, the master/lover was only a man who desired the slave woman and had the power to take her as a woman. Patriarchal society would define the perfect man as the perfect master, and it was the submissiveness of the slave woman that made her the perfect slave and the perfect woman. After all, a man’s power over a woman was like the master’s power over a slave. It came from “innate superiority.”46 But the ultimate place of desire and fulfillment of the submissive and perfected woman was in violent conflict with the rage and humiliation and forced labor of being a slave woman forced to lie in the arms of the enslaver, the enemy ultimately responsible for her humiliation and her suffering. Yet the woman could not be separated from the color. One black woman remembers:One mark in particular stands out in my memory, one she bore just above her right eye. As well as she liked to regale me with stories of her scars, this one she never discussed with me. Whenever I would ask a question concerning it, she would simply shake her head and say “White men are as low as dogs, child. Stay from them.” It was only after her death, and since I became a woman that I was told by my own mother that 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.47
Though mulattoes were “common as blackberries,”48 most black women resisted white men’s sexual advances and resented being a convenient scapegoat for the white women’s sexual suppression. Black women were often unwilling participants in the sexual lives of white men and women. In spite of close contact, many did not necessarily admire or identify with white families. They often longed to go home to the black world to care for their own men and children.
As she crossed the tracks to the black world, she could breathe a little easier, soften, and slow up her steps. She could smile at her neighbors and kin along the road or warn them away with her stern and tired face. They understood that her day had been rough. The care of her children, her men, and her sisters would occupy her time now. She would find private space in cleaning her house, tending her garden, fixing her room with doilies and trinkets. She would sew sister’s dress, braid her baby girl’s hair, and fix that hat for Sunday’s church meeting. In this world there was space for her to pull herself together. The space was contained and narrow, but it did give her easement from the white man’s world and his desire for her body.
Against the white man’s animal panting and arbitrary carnal desires that stalked their daughters, the old ones’ harsh words and demands of modesty emphasized with a slap or a hard look forced the girls to hide and conserve the precious darkness between their legs. The old ones would frequently frustrate and confuse their daughters’ sexual desires, for though their rage originated from the sexual abuses of white men, they extended taboos against all sexual expression.
African cultural values taught deference and respect to the elderly, who set parameters for sexual, romantic, and marital relationships within tribal rituals and rites. Within slave and rural black communities away from the interferences of white men, the deference continued.49 Young black men courted and romanced young women with African-like ritual and respect, always under the watchful eyes of the old ones.
When this courting process proceeded naturally and freely, the couple might eventually have a child, or if the girl had already had her first baby (often by a different man) they might marry and settle into a long-lasting monogamous union.50
The old ones in the new world were consulted for their approval and consent to marital plans or pregnancies by their daughters and sons. Sometimes, mothers and grandmothers (fathers and grandfathers also) were unmoved by romance or youthful passion and clamped down on their daughters’ sexual desires for any but the most stable mates with the firmness of an iron chastity belt.
Though black women were mothers, midwives, and farmers, with daughters growing up close to them, frequently in crowded homes with many siblings and relatives, most young black women learned little explicit information about sex.51 Thus, in spite of and because of the historical sexual abuse of black women, both black men and black women lived sexually conservative lives characterized by modesty and discretion. In fact, most black women were reluctant to openly discuss specific sexual abuses against their person by white men, even within their own families.52
The black man moved toward the black woman, clothing her raped and abused body with the mantle of respectable womanhood, giving protection and sometimes claiming ownership of her. Many black men agreed with white men that “wives should submit themselves to their husbands in all things.”53 As the dominant institution within the black community, the black church reinforced and supported the traditional patriarchal views of men claiming wardship over women.
Protecting black women was t
he most significant measure of black manhood and the central aspect of black male patriarchy. Black men felt outrage and shame at their frequent inability to protect black women, not merely from the whippings and hard work, but also from the master/ lover’s touch. During and after slavery, black men spoke out angrily against the harsh treatment of black women, many vowing never to allow black women to be sexually abused and economically exploited again.54 Their methods often became rigidly patriarchal; however, they did in many instances keep black women from becoming the open prey of the white man. W. E. B. Du Bois summed up the feelings of many black men:... but one thing I shall never forgive, neither in this world nor in the world to come: it’s [the white South’s] wanton and continued and persistent insulting of the black womanhood which it sought and seeks to prostitute to its lust.55
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