After the Civil War, black men and black women married each other in droves, giving their unions legitimacy and validating their right to choose and love each other.56 Many felt that the slave master could no longer come between black men and black women for the law connected them. Yet in their successful attempts to recapture political and economic power, white men claimed a glorified past of total domination over black people, continuing to enter the “heart of darkness” as their right.
Although, during Reconstruction, terror and hunger forced black men and black women into peonage and sharecropping, the black community resisted the new chains of white male domination. Women vowed to stand by their men, never to return to the fields, to the kitchens, or to the beds of white men. As the white community attacked and extended its dominion, black women carved out new ways to survive as well as uphold their marriages and the implied sanctity of their bodies.
Black men struggled to farm their own land in order to provide for their families, keeping wives and daughters away from white men’s farms and arms. Many asserted as one ex-slave did to his white father/master who doubted his ability to provide for his family. “I am going to feed and clothe them, and I can do it on bare rock.”57 Black women withdrew from farm labor for the white man, and when they had to work, they insisted on day work rather than sleep-in domestic work.58 Black women also sewed, dressed hair, washed clothes, and cooked meals in their own homes for wages in order to keep out of the white men’s homes.
In the context of the black community of resistance, “heterosexual privilege usually became the only privilege black women had. For without racial or sexual privilege, marriage and motherhood become the last resort.”59 The very traditional experiences of motherhood and sex within marriage were not necessarily viewed as oppressive to black women, for they were the literal and symbolic weapons she could utilize to assure the biological and social reproduction of black people. Marriage and motherhood were humanizing experiences that gave her life meaning, purpose and choice. These experiences were denied within the racist milieu where her humanity was questioned and her human rights and privileges to love and be loved were denied.
The African values retained within the black community in combination with its learned Christian values reinforced sexual loyalty and monogamy for black women. Although white society described her as an insatiable animal with no feelings of love and commitment, in one way or another, and with a variety of consequences, black women have been monogamous, serially monogamous, and sexually loyal partners to black men (and sometimes white men also).
Black men held a wide range of views about black women from those that reinforced female subordination to those that reinforced equal social relations between the sexes. Many black men, moving away from traditional patriarchal views, supported and encouraged independence in their wives, and more often in their daughters.60 Black women were supported by black men in building black elementary schools and community institutions and in encouraging their daughters to become educated as teachers to escape the “abominations” of the white man. As teachers, black women could be kept within the black community away from the sexual advances of white men and under the watchful protecting eyes of male principals and ministers as well. Teaching required of black women an even more rigorous adherence to a sex code enjoining chastity and model womanhood than that guiding other black women.61
Sex codes upholding the values of monogamy and sexual loyalty were part of the extended kinship networks that provided valuable emotional, physical, and economic support for black women. Kin accepted children sired by white men into the family. There was no such thing as “illegitimacy,” for each child was considered part of the community, where its mother might be stigmatized by rarely ostracized. Women abandoned by their husbands were viewed with sympathy. To a great extent, black women forced into sexual relations with white men were still considered suitable mates by black men. There was the widespread practice of black men parenting children not sired by them, even when a child’s father was white. Nearly every black family had a white absentee father or grandfather and a wide range of skin colors. Only those women who continued to live outside the sexual code, which condemned adultery and promiscuity with white or black men, were viewed as sinful.62 Both during and after slavery, black women and men have had a complex history of struggling together to maintain stable, monogamous families, transmuting the destructive forces from without, cooperating and supporting each other from within.
The historical oppression of black women and men should have created social equality between them, but even after the end of slavery when the white patriarch receded, maleness and femaleness continued to be defined by patriarchal structures, with black men declaring wardship over black women. In the black community, the norm of manhood was patriarchal power; the norm of womanhood was adherence to it, though both black men and women selected which aspects of these norms they would emphasize.
Many black women became enraged at the thought of being owned and taken by any man, even if he had black skin. The whippings, the work, the penetration by the whipper and the white master/lover left them with rage and rebellion against the traditional roles of wife and mother. They would resist as Rose Williams resisted whenforced to live with a man named Rufus because the master wanted them “to bring forth portly children” warned the slave to stay away from her “fore I busts yous brains out and stomp on dem.” She finally relented when threatened with a whipping, but she never married, explaining, “after what I done for de massa I’s never wants no truck with any man—de lawd forgive dis cullud woman, but he have to ‘scuse me and look for some others for to’plenish de earth.”63
Black women within the rural black community often defied the restrictions on their womanhood and sexuality by living alone (near family and kin) and working their own farms, running their own lives without men as mates and protectors, frequently sojourning for truth and God. Many of these women learned these independent ways from their fathers and brothers. Women often lived with women as both emotional and sexual companions. Women in urban black communities had several male lovers and companions but did not submit to them in traditional ways because they maintained an independent life as community workers, political and social activists, and workers within the paid labor force.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, both rural and urban black women followed the role models of black female artists, singers, dancers, and actresses who expressed and reinforced the sensuality of African traditions by shaking and shimmying on stages and in clubs and roadhouses. Black women leaving the restrictions of the rural South agreed with Bessie Smith:I’m a young woman and ain’t done runnin’ roun’ ...
Some people call me a hobo, some call me a bum.
Nobody knows my name, nobody knows what I’ve done.
See that long, lonesome road? Lord you know it’s gotta end.
And I’m a good woman and I can get plenty men.64
These black women lived lives of explicit sexuality and erotic excitement with both men and women. As they broke away from the traditional paternal restraints within the black community, they were castigated for seeming to reflect the truth of the white man’s views of black women as whorish and loose. But these “wild women”65 did not care, modeling for Southern rural black women a city life full of flashy clothes, fast cars, and access to sophisticated men.
However, most black women did not have access to the mobility of a freer sexual life even within marriage until the 1960s, when large-scale urbanization, a shift from domestic to clerical jobs, and the breakup of the traditional kinship networks of the rural South took place. Even then, black women’s sexuality was still contained within a white male patriarchy that continued to view her as already sexually liberated.
Black woman could not be completely controlled and defined by her own men, for she had already learned to manage and resist the advances of white men, earning and internalizing a reputation for toughness and strength, for resi
liency and resolve, that enhanced the myth of her as both matriarch and wild woman. Her political resistance increased her potential to become a woman of power, capable of defining herself and rising to protect herself and her children, frequently throwing the mantle of protection over black men as well.
Slavery and womanhood remained interconnected long after the formal bondage of black people was over. Being a black woman with a black man could still mean slavery. And the woman could not be separated from the color. Being a black woman without a black man could also still mean slavery. And the color could not be separated from the woman.
These contradictions have been fully explored by only a few black women, for black women and black men continue to be engaged in a community of struggle to create a space in which to live and to survive:Black women speaking with many voices and expressing many individual opinions, have been nearly unanimous in their insistence that their own emancipation cannot be separated from the emancipation of their men. Their liberation depends on the liberation of the race and the improvement of life in the black community.66
Sex between black women and black men, between black men and black men, between black women and black women, is meshed within complex cultural, political, and economic circumstances. All black sexuality is underlined by a basic theme: where, when, and under what circumstances could/ would black men and black women connect with each other intimately and privately when all aspects of their lives were considered the dominion of the public, white master/lover’s power?
If the sexual act between white men and black women was a ritual reenactment of domination, the oppression failed to completely dampen the sexual expression of black women within the black community, which often became a ritual enactment of affirmation of her freedom and happiness within intense emotional connections with her men, her sisters, her children, her gods, and more often with herself. In spite of centuries of personal and political rape, black women could still say, “i found god in myself/and i loved her/i loved her fiercely.”67
History, traditionally written as a record of public events, has obscured and omitted the relationship between public events and private acts. Therefore, sex has always been in the closet of American history, hidden away from and kept outside the public realm of political and economic events. White men used their power in the public sphere to construct a private sphere that would meet their needs and their desire for black women, which if publically admitted would have undermined the false construct of race they needed to maintain public power. Therefore, the history of black women in America reflects the juncture where the private and public spheres and personal and political oppression meet.
The master/lover ruled over the world; he divided it up and called everyone out of their name. During the day, he would call her “wench,” “negress,” “Sable Venus,” “dusky Sal,” and “Auntie.” He described and wrote about her endurance, ate her biscuits, and suckled her breasts. At night he would chant false endearments and would feel engulfed within her darkness. He would accuse her of raping herself, naming his lesser brothers as the fathers of his and her children. He would record every battle, keep every letter, document each law, building monuments to himself, but he would never tell the true story, the complete story, of how he used to rape to make the profit, of how he used the bodies of women to satisfy his needs. He would never tell how he built a society with the aid of dark-skinned women, while telling the world he did it alone.
He would cover the tracks between his house and hers, he would deny the semen-stained sheets she was forced to wash. History would become all that men did during the day, but nothing of what they did during the night. He would forget her children. He would deny his love or lust for her. He would deny his failure to obey his own laws. He refused to listen to the logical extension of his argument for the massacres, the slave raids, the genocide, the lynch mobs, the Ku Klux Klan. He could not live up to his own fears and arguments against mongrelization of the race, the separation of black from white. He built an exterior world that reflected his fragmented insides.
But the woman learned to face him, the rapist who hated and loved her with such passion. She learned to use her darkness to create light. She would make the divided, white and black, external and internal world into wholeness. She would “lean on Jesus,” reaching out to help and for help, and would gather around her children and kin to help them make the world whole and livable. She would mother all the children—black and white—and serve both men—conqueror and conquered—knowing “all there was to know,” for she could not separate the color from the woman.
Only a few daring men, mostly black ones, would recognize that only she understood what it had taken for white men to dominate the world and what it would mean, finally, to be free. But some black women who voiced what they knew did not survive:A slave woman ain’t allowed to respect herself, if she would. I had a pretty sister, she was whiter than I am, for she took more after her father. When she was sixteen years old, her master sent for her. When he sent for her again, she cried and didn’t want to go. She told mother her troubles, and she tried to encourage her to be decent and hold up her head above such things if she could. Her master was so mad, to think she had complained to her mother, that he sold her right off to Louisiana, and we heard afterward that she died there of hard usage.68
But others sold down river survived and remembered their mothers and fathers, remembered the white master/lover, the black master/lover, and the black brother/lover. They, in their turn, gave their daughters and sons the gifts of determination and freedom, the will to love and the strength to have faith. Some would accept these gifts, some would reject them. History, however, would obliterate the entire story, occasionally giving it only a false footnote. But deep within the daughters’ hearts and minds it would be remembered, and this memory would become the historical record everything had to be measured by.
ENDNOTES
1 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (New York: Dell Publishing, 1960).
2 See Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).
3 T. Obinkaram Echewa, “African Sexual Attitudes,” Essence 2, no. 9 (January 1981): 56.
4 Sarah La Forey, “Female Circumcision” (manuscript).
5 Winthrop Jordan, White over Black (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 3—43.
6 Richard G. Hofstadter, America at 1750: A Social Portrait (New York: Vintage, 1973), 108.
7 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 116.
8 Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” Black Scholar 3, no. 4 (December 1971): 7.
9 Barbara Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings (New York: Viking, 1979), 284.
10 Jordan, White over Black, 3—43.
11 Ibid., 148.
12 Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America, 2d ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1983), 115—26.
13 A Leon Higgenbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process—The Colonial Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 43—47.
14 Jordan, White over Black, 138—39.
15 Ibid.
16 Cited in Carl Degler, Out of Our Past: Forces That Shaped Modern America (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 32.
17 Ibid., 83.
18 Hofstadter, America at 1750, 111.
19 Ibid., 115.
20 Ibid., 116.
21 Degler, Out of Our Past, 163.
22 ————, Autobiographical Accounts of Negro Ex-Slaves (Nashville: Fisk University Press, 1968), 2.
23 Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750—1925 (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 76, 138.
24 Degler, Autobiographical Accounts, 1.
25 Degler, Out of Our Past, 34.
26 Davis, “Black Woman’s Role.”
27 E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 53.
28 Gerda Lerner,
ed., Black Women in White America (New York: Vintage, 1973), 156.
29 Ibid., 154.
30 John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, rev. ed. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Anchor, 1949), 139.
31 Jacqueline Jones, “My Mother Was Much of a Woman: Black Women, Work, and the Family Under Slavery” (manuscript, 1980).
32 Quoted in John Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 221.
33 Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings, 284.
34 Autobiographical Accounts, 1—2.
35 Quoted in Anne Firor Scott, Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830—1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 50.
36 Ibid., 34—36.
37 Ibid., 37.
38 Ibid., 52.
39 Jordan, White over Black, 148.
40 Scott, Southern Lady, 52.
41 Autobiographical Accounts, 1.
42 Jones, “My Mother Was Much of a Woman,” 41—42.
43 David Katzman, “Domestic Service: Women’s Work,” in Women Working: Theories and Facts in Perspective, ed. Ann Stromberg and Shirley Harkness (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1978), 381—83.
44 Autobiographical Accounts, 1.
45 Frazier, Negro Family, 67.
46 Chase-Riboud, Sally Hemings, 40.
47 Frazier, Negro Family, 47.
48 Scott, Southern Lady, 53.
49 Barbara Omolade, “African and Slave Motherhood” (masters thesis, Goddard College, 1979).
50 Jones, “My Mother Was Much of a Woman,” 36.
51 Results of Oral History Class Projects—Black Women’s History Courses, 1975—1982—comp. and ed. Barbara Omolade.
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