The memoirs of the American slave Harriet Jacobs have left us a moving portrait of the vulnerability of young female slaves like Sukey Ann:
The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear. The lash and the foul talk of her master and his sons are her teachers. When she is fourteen or fifteen, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.
The reasons that slave girls resisted were myriad:
She may have had religious principles … she may have a lover, whose good opinion and peace of mind are dear to her heart; or the profligate men who have power over her may be exceedingly odious to her. But resistance is hopeless.
The enslaved woman was in a particularly vulnerable situation if she was pretty: “That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.”
Jacobs’s own trials began when she entered her fifteenth year, “a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl,” when her master, Dr. Flint, forty years her senior, “began to whisper foul words” in her ear. “Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.” His pursuit of her was relentless. Sometimes he was gentle and charming; at other times “stormy” and “terrifying.” He reminded her constantly that she was his property; “that I must be subject to his will in all things.” His wife, meanwhile, was so overcome with jealousy that she refused to protect her young charge.
Dr. Flint was unusual in that he wanted Jacobs to submit to him without rape, but nonetheless she was appalled. She trembled at the sound of his footsteps and shuddered when she saw him approaching. She was acutely aware of her legal vulnerability: “there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.” The psychological impact of the situation was profound: “I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but it is hard to tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, nor how I am still pained in retrospect.” Jacobs only escaped her owner’s sexual attentions when she took up with a younger and equally powerful white man.
Even after the woman had succumbed, her vulnerability continued. The planter Hugh Perry Keane, whose estate was situated on the island of St. Vincent, kept a diary that detailed his tumultuous five-year affair with his “Sable Venus” Betty Keane. It was serious enough for him to purchase her from his father in 1791, and Keane Senior was happy to facilitate their liaison since he had his own “Betty” on the plantation. Though he was a single man, Keane was too conventional to make their relationship public as some planters did. So to the outside world he was a handsome single dandy pursuing eligible Vincentian ladies, while in private he was in a ménage with his black slave. It was a passionate relationship. His diary begins with the words: “I wrote a few lines to Miss B.” And when she was away from the plantation for a few weeks he could not sleep there and pined for her horribly. Their union was marked by much drama, jealous rages on both sides, and unfounded accusations of infidelity; on numerous occasions she pouted and he locked her out of the house.
Their liaison did not mean that Betty escaped the whip; she was beaten when Keane felt jealous or frustrated. But her role was more than just sexual: she was his lover, confidante and helpmate. In lieu of a lawful spouse, she was his “plantation wife,” delegating work to the domestic staff, ordering essentials for the great house and generally overseeing his household. She also provided a vital link between him and his slaves; her greater understanding of plantation dynamics meant that she was able to give him invaluable advice on managing his charges. Their relationship eventually ended after a night out in the capital when Betty was raped by a sailor while Keane was collapsed in a drunken stupor. Instead of sympathizing, he blamed her for the incident and labelled her “a Jezebel.” Despite her pleas, Keane refused to take her back and Betty was left to fend for herself. Their respective fates reflect the injustice of history: Hugh Keane went on to marry an English heiress, while Betty disappeared into obscurity. Despite visiting his plantations in St. Vincent many times subsequently, he never mentioned her again.
Whether Robert Cooper and Sukey Ann’s relationship was as tumultuous as Keane and Betty’s is unknown, but it is evident that he had some affection for the woman, or at least some sense of obligation to her, otherwise he would not have manumitted her and her children. What this relationship meant for Sukey Ann remains a mystery. Can we even speak of commitment or choice or desire in such an unequal situation? Was it the living hell of repeated rape? Or was she willing to trade sex for the opportunity to gain the greater comfort and security that black concubines enjoyed amidst the dangers and the deprivations of plantation life? Is it possible, despite the profoundly unequal, even tragic circumstances of their relationship, that these two could have somehow loved each other? One imagines that several of these things might simultaneously have been true. The historian Barbara Bush stresses that not all interracial relationships were predicated on violence and abuse. Indeed, she argues that it is possible that the sensational accounts of sexual exploitation of women of colour by white men have overshadowed the fact that there may have been healthy and loving sexual relationships between these two groups during slavery. Contemporary accounts support this, as John Waller wrote: “I have observed many instances of [white men] being perfectly captivated by their mulatto mistresses, who thus obtain their freedom and that of their children from the master who cohabits with them.”
The most significant of Robert Cooper’s illicit relationships was with a mulatto woman called Mary Anne. She was his wife Mary Ashby’s body servant: the person who woke her in the morning, drew her bath, cared for her clothes and styled her hair. The relationship between a mistress and a personal servant was one of the most intimate on the plantation. The work took most of the hours of Mary Anne’s day, and it is possible that she often slept in Mary Ashby’s bedroom. The two women would have spent more time in each other’s company than Mary Ashby would have spent with her husband. She was the person most knowledgeable about Mary Ashby’s habits and who learned how to anticipate and meet her needs. The role of body servant was so important that Mary Anne was a significant figure on the plantation; but Mary Anne was a mulatto and a slave and Mary Ashby was white and free, so an unspoken but yawning gulf existed between them.
When Robert Cooper became interested in Mary Anne, it was a scenario worthy of the most steamy plantation novel. Unquestionably the close daily intimacy they shared—even with his wife present—made it easier and more likely for them to develop a relationship. But this proximity must also have lent their clandestine relationship a very tense and claustrophobic quality. And since this particular plot turned on sexual rivalry and complex power struggles, the ménage à trois was no doubt the talk of Burkes. The principal players were locked into a complex power struggle that went way beyond mere jealousy. The central protagonist, Robert Cooper, had the luxury of being largely in control of the situation. We don’t know if he enjoyed the illicit nature of this liaison, or whether he felt guilty or worried. After all, even in slave society, conducting an affair with someone so close to one’s wife was potentially disastrous.
Mary Ashby could not have been unaware of her husband’s relationships with his female slaves, but I wonder what she felt about these women. Many planters’ wives regarded their husband’s relationships with slave women as inevitable, but this didn’t mean that it didn’t upset them. Traveller after traveller noted the open resentment that white women displayed towards their female slaves. Edward Thompson, who visited Barbados in 1756, remarked that Barbadian white women frequently swore at their slaves “in a vulgar corrupt dialect.” He blamed their behaviour on Barbadian men “who carry on amours with the ladies’ slaves.” Many wives may even have feared these lovers, since there were stories in circulation about slave-mistresses wh
o poisoned their rivals in order to get the “top job.” Being perpetually in her company must have been excruciating as she imagined (or noticed) her husband and maid exchanging surreptitious glances over her head. But perhaps Mary Ashby believed, as so many in her position did, that she should simply put up with things, playing the part of the mistress of the plantation in public and never revealing her chagrin.
The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Mary Ashby had little else to distract her. There were so many servants bustling around Burkes’ great house that there was scarcely any domestic work left for her to do; and it is safe to assume that Mary Ashby did not roam the house making the beds, or emptying the chamber pots. She may, like many plantation wives, have had a few specialities such as cake baking or jam making, but the role of mistress was essentially supervisory: she stood at the ends of beds berating slaves on the way they tidied rooms, or read out the recipes as their slaves stirred the batter. Therefore women like Mary Ashby had a lot of time for thinking, brooding, and “persecuting their slaves.”
Then there were the children: a living reminder of her husband’s infidelities, and of her rejection, impotence and shame. We cannot know for sure how Mary Ashby coped with her husband’s bastards running around the plantation, whether she even knew which children he had fathered or whether she was reduced to scrutinizing the young faces she encountered, wondering whether they were his. According to one American slave, many women regarded these illegitimate children as a constant offence:
She hates its very presence, and when a slave holding woman hates, she wants not means to give that hate telling effect. Women—white women, I mean—are Idols in the south, not wives, for the slave women are preferred in many instances; and if these idols but nod or lift a finger woe to the poor victim: kicks, cuts and stripes are sure to follow. Masters are frequently compelled to sell this class of their slaves, out of deference to the feelings of their white wives; and shocking and scandalous as it may seem for a man to sell his own blood to the traffickers in human flesh, it is often an act of humanity toward the slave-child to be thus removed from his merciless tormentors.
While the situation was less taboo in the West Indies, some wives did agitate for the sale of their rival’s children. They often conspired with their own families, and even his, to make sure that these women wouldn’t be included in wills or receive other benefits. Other wives chose to keep their dignity intact and ignore the adultery that was taking place within their own home. A wife was, after all, socially and financially at the mercy of her husband; as was his mistress.
What of Mary Anne, the maid? Her story was in many ways typical of the experience of many female house servants. It was largely in the domestic sphere that women were able to gain promotion to the level of skilled workers, and certainly this was preferable in many ways to the brutal outdoor work of cane cultivation. But so great was the assumption that these women were sexually available to the men of the house that many were employed merely because their masters found them attractive. Indeed, the sale price of domestics was often inflated in advertisements and at the slave market to reflect the expectation that they would be fulfilling two jobs: as concubine and maid.
In such an unequal society, some women would have regarded a relationship with their owners as an opportunity. Many mulatto women avoided having relationships with slave men. They were either in long-term relationships with white men on the plantation, or they married other mixed-race servants from other properties. This is upsetting from a contemporary perspective, where people of colour are encouraged to value solidarity in the face of oppression, but with the limited choices available to them, these women sometimes embraced the chance to safeguard themselves and their children from the worst vicissitudes of a racist society.
In deciding to become his mistress, Mary Anne had to weigh the potential advantages against the possible dangers. In most of these situations, the relationship between the wife and the mistress was permanently soured, and so Mary Anne risked endless slights or even violence. She would also have realized that Robert Cooper’s long-term attentions were by no means guaranteed and that she could be discarded as easily as she had been taken up.
It appears that Robert Cooper and Mary Anne did come to care for each other profoundly. They would, after all, have ten children together. The eldest was Robert Henry Ashby. He was followed in quick succession by Alice Christian Ashby, Elizabeth Mary Ashby, Margaret Ann Ashby, Caroline Kezar Ashby, Alexander Lindsay Ashby, John George Ashby, Thomas Cooper Ashby, Arabella Ann Ashby, and William Armstrong Ashby. Theirs was clearly a stable and domesticated relationship, which grew even more so after the death of Mary Ashby. But I cannot help but wonder how many years it took, and how many children were born, before she stopped calling him “Massa” and was allowed the privilege of calling him “Robert.”
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’Tisn’t he who has stood and looked on, that can tell you what slavery is—’tis he who has endured.
—JOHN LITTLE, FUGITIVE SLAVE
NUMBERED AMONG Robert Cooper’s impressive seraglio was my great-great-great-great-grandmother. What can we know for sure about this woman? Regrettably, very little, as Frederick Douglass declared: “Genealogical trees do not flourish amongst slaves.” Deprived of the time, information and education to record their own lives, slaves had no way to keep track of their families; indeed, most didn’t even know their own date of birth. So even if I could ask her, she might not have been able to solve the puzzle. Had she been one of Robert Cooper’s favourites she might have appeared in the manumission records, if he had chosen to set her free; or in wills or deeds, if he had provided her with goods or property. But this was not the case. So it is most likely that she was just another casual sexual conquest.
She was probably born on the plantation, since most of Burkes’ slaves had enduring roots on the property. It was extremely unlikely that she was a “saltwater” slave—that is, someone born in Africa—because by the end of the eighteenth century most Barbadian slaves were born on the island. She was probably young, as Robert Cooper seemed to prefer his women that way. West Indian planters frequently joked that girls, like fruit, ripened more quickly in the tropics.
We know of this woman’s existence only because she bore Robert Cooper a son: John Stephen Ashby, my first identifiable slave forebear. He was born in 1803 and probably delivered by a slave midwife at Burkes. His mother could not have helped being apprehensive during her pregnancy. Giving birth in the early nineteenth century, whether you were black or white, enslaved or free, was a perilous business. But John Stephen’s mother was lucky. Had she lived a few generations earlier, her experience of pregnancy and childbirth would have been very different.
In the earliest days of slavery, when the Barbadian planters had no interest in increasing the slave population, newborns were regarded as a nuisance, a distraction that kept women from work. New mothers were expected to return to the fields almost immediately after giving birth and were allowed to nurse their children only if they kept on working. Shocked at the sight of these women in the cane fields with their babies strapped to them, Richard Ligon remarked: “For they carry burdens on their backs and yet work too.” His perspective was, of course, very different from that of the slave women themselves; for them the work was the burden, not the child. Unsurprisingly, the island shared the terrible infant mortality rates that bedevilled all the sugar isles.
By the late eighteenth century, however, the Barbadian planters had decided it was more economical to “breed rather than buy” and had shifted to pro-natalist policies in the hope of increasing the birth rate among the slave population. This meant that pregnant women were often withdrawn from the first gang, which did the most strenuous work, and put in slightly less demanding positions until they delivered.
In these newly enlightened times then, John Stephen’s mother was probably encouraged to bear her child safely. But she certainly would not be supported in raising him. As one slave noted:
> The slave mother can be spared long enough from the field to endure all the bitterness of a mother’s anguish when it adds another name to a master’s ledger, but not long enough to receive the joyous reward afforded by the intelligent smiles of her child. I never think of this terrible interference of slavery with infantile affections, and its diverting them from their natural course, without feelings to which I can give no adequate expression.
So not long after John Stephen’s birth, his mother was forced to return to work and consign her child to the care of other women, those in their fifties and sixties who could no longer manage the rigours of field work. Frederick Douglass wrote that “The practice of separating children from their mothers … is a marked feature of the cruelty and barbarity of the slave system.” He noted that the custom had a terrible impact on slave women, who had “children but no family!” But he was even more grieved on his own behalf, because he felt that he had been denied the natural connection a child should have with his mother. Today we use the term “attachment disorder” to describe the profound impact on children’s emotional and psychological development of being denied a consistent and intimate relationship with a trusted caregiver. We can only guess at how John Stephen and millions like him were affected by being denied the core human experience of a parent–child relationship.
Just as it is impossible to name John Stephen’s mother, so it is difficult to definitively verify that Robert Cooper was his father, since planters virtually never declared themselves as parents of slaves on plantation records. The social rules and the law functioned both to facilitate white men’s sexual exploitation of black women, and also to protect the men themselves from the consequences of their actions. As one American slave who was also the child of a white estate owner noted: “Men do not love those who remind them of their sins—unless they have a mind to repent—and the mulatto child’s face is a standing accusation against him who is master and father to the child.” But the situation was somewhat different in the Caribbean, where interracial liaisons were more openly tolerated, and, though not publicly claimed, paternity was often acknowledged in more subtle ways. In the case of John Stephen, the evidence pointing towards Robert Cooper being his father is convincing: apart from island lore, there was the lighter skin that marked his father out as white, as well as the physical resemblance to the Ashbys. There is a hint in his name too. Robert Cooper had a penchant for giving his illegitimate children traditional English two-handed names like his own. Thus his mixed-race children, including John Stephen, Robert Henry and Alice Christian, stand out among the rather more traditional slave names that dominate his ledgers. These small distinctions and offerings are often the clearest clue to a slave’s parentage. As the historian James Walvin noted: “Few planters accepted their slave children as legitimate offspring, but they often bestowed on them and their mothers a string of material benefits and privileges generally denied to other slaves.” According to local historian Robert Morris, it is doubtful that Robert Cooper would have allowed John Stephen to marry using his surname unless he had given him explicit permission to do so, and it is reasonable to assume that this was because he accepted John Stephen was his son.
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