My mother, my daughter, and I were far safer than our enslaved ancestors had been, but I knew that for five generations, some of our forebears had been slaves and others had been slaveholders. It was hard to accept that some of our ancestors were victims and that the perpetrators of the crimes against them were family too. Every member of my African-American family, the Other Madisons, I painfully understood, was a product of unwanted sex and incest.
One day during my mother’s visit, we sat together in the living room, the translucent curtains muting the gold of the afternoon sun. My mom spoke, and her hands, resting on her lap, looked pale against the bright fabric of her pantsuit. I envisioned Madison Sr.’s pale hands against Mandy’s nearly black skin. White hands touching dark skin are part of my family’s history.
“In 1797,” Mom said, “Madison Jr. left his political life in Philadelphia and returned to Montpelier. He had represented Virginia at the Continental Congress from 1780 to 1786, played a major role in the writing and ratification of the U.S. Constitution from 1787 to 1789, drafted the Bill of Rights and helped get it ratified in 1791, and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1789 to 1797.
But Madison wasn’t satisfied. He felt he had nothing that was truly his. As the oldest son, he was first in line to inherit his father’s assets—the money, the plantation, the business enterprises, and the slaves. He had married the vivacious widow Dolley Payne Todd three years earlier, but when the couple arrived in Virginia, she was the future president’s only ‘possession.’ He wanted more than that. He wanted children. When he married Dolley, she already had a child from her previous marriage. Madison was happy to serve as father to that child, but he wanted his own. So he imposed his attentions on Coreen. And they had a son.”
“Just like that?”
“There must be a story behind it, but nobody knows the details, like when or how many times. Most likely she was ashamed or afraid to tell anybody except perhaps Mandy, her own mother.”
“Why Coreen?” I asked. “She was his half sister. He must have known that.”
“Daddy, your Gramps, told me that Madison was fond of apple pies, and it was known around the plantation that Coreen’s were the best. He saw her walking back and forth between the kitchen and the mansion. He wanted more than her pies. She was pretty and young . . .”
“And his slave,” I added.
“The plantation was a close-knit community, but he was away a lot. Maybe he assumed her father was one of the white men working there.”
“Assumed? Wanted to believe is more likely.”
“In either case,” Mom continued, “I think emotional need blinded him.”
“Or lust.” I did not want my mother to protect him.
“Maybe that too,” she conceded. “But mainly, I think, he needed to prove to himself he was a man.”
“What kind of excuse is that?”
“It’s a reason,” Mom answered, and it occurred to me that she also needed to protect herself and her pride in the family legacy. She would not, in her way of thinking, dishonor the family.
“But we were blamed for the incest, Mom. ‘Happy whores’ is what the massas called us. To them and most white folks around, we were barely human. They actually believed African women had sex with orangutans!” I said. “And those same white folks also believed that when black women got here and saw white men’s pale skin, they couldn’t help but use every feminine ploy they could come up with to get next to it. Madison might have thought that way. His buddy Tom certainly believed that nonsense. Jefferson wrote it in a book, probably with his favorite slave, Sally, in bed next to him. Washington might have been a member of the club too. I don’t know if George claimed helplessness when faced with the supposed animal powers of black women, but he did father a son with a slave named Venus who didn’t even belong to him. Mom, what the most powerful men in America did to the most vulnerable women is sickening. And imagine how those women felt—used, defenseless, angry, degraded.”
We sat in silence. I knew what I was saying undermined her reverence for the Founding Fathers, but now that we had started this conversation, I could not stop. I might not have this opportunity again.
“Mom,” I said, “saying that Mandy attracted the master’s attention because she was such a good worker implies that she seduced him, that he was the victim or, at the very least, that she was responsible for her violation. But in fact, he probably thought she was so eager to get her hands on his white skin and so oversexed, she could not be violated.”
“Getting upset doesn’t help, Dolly. And you shouldn’t think ill of the Madisons. That’s just the way it was back then.”
“That doesn’t make it right, and they knew it. White southerners called what their men did to black women ‘trespassing,’” I said. “That meant some man had trespassed on the master’s property. Since a master couldn’t trespass on his own property, what was it called when he, Madison included, went from cabin to cabin?”
“We’ve always said visiting,” Mom said.
“What a cowardly euphemism, especially for the actions of a supposedly great man. The result of all this trespassing and visiting was a lot of mulattos.”
Mom nodded. “Some mixed-race children and white children looked so much alike that when a bunch of them were running around a plantation, the only way to tell which ones were slaves was by their clothes. Raggedy—part white. Brand-spanking new—all white.” She chuckled. I didn’t.
My friend Danielle had told me that Canadians say, “If you shake any family tree, an Indian feather will fall out.” I could coin a similar saying for Americans: “If you shake any family tree, a chain will rattle.”
The slave community knew that every little black girl was at risk. Did anyone warn these children? Did black girls know that when the time came, there would be little or nothing they could do to protect their own bodies?
One morning several years ago, I took Amtrak from Boston to New York City and then a subway to Harlem to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. I sat at a long oak table and studied photographs depicting slave life. On page after page, the subjects focused gravely on hoeing rows of soil or picking cotton or tobacco, or they posed rigidly in front of a shack or beside a field. I did not find a single snapshot of children playing.
I returned home the following morning. That evening while I scoured a pot, I thought about my carefree childhood. I’d had two best friends, Patsy and Sheila. We went everywhere together. One afternoon when we were eight or nine years old, we went to a movie theater to see The Wizard of Oz for the fifth time. Afterward, at Sheila’s house, we figured out how to skip down the Yellow Brick Road just like Dorothy and her companions. All of Sheila’s neighbors heard “‘We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz!’” as the three of us, arm in arm, skipped down her street, singing at the top of our lungs.
Gazing beyond my vague reflection in the darkened window above the sink, I recalled that day on Sheila’s street. In place of my childhood friends and me, I saw this:
Three earthbound angels, carried on clouds of dust, frolicked helter-skelter past rows of slave cabins. Skipping along—arms linked, feet dancing, legs flying, heads bobbing—the girls were oblivious to everything except their glee. For them, at that moment, there was no bondage and no past or future, only the untroubled present. I imagined the sound of their joy as they sang in the cadence of an African chant, unaware of the irony of the words, picked up from games played with the master’s children.
Curly Locks! Curly Locks!
Will you be mine?
You shall not wash dishes
Nor feed the swine
But sit on a cushion
And sew a fine seam
And feed upon strawberries
Sugar and cream.
The girl on the right, the tallest, had fair skin and long, wavy hair. As she skipped and sang, one of her slender hands wafted through the air to the tune’s melody and enhanced her fluid movements. Th
is mulatto, when she got a little older, would likely become an obedient house servant, an unobtrusive addition to the décor of the Big House—her voice and joy hushed.
On the left, the clenched hands and stomping feet of a sinewy, dark-skinned girl punctuated the percussion. Kinky hair formed a short, tight braid at the crown of her head, and she had deep-set black eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a broad nose. This young slave’s destiny lay among a million rows of tobacco or cotton or rice or wheat or sugarcane or hemp fiber grown for the wealth and security of “the massa”—her voice and joy stifled by exhausting labor.
In the center, supported by her friends, a short, chubby girl with round cheeks and medium brown skin danced, her soft abdomen and round thighs bouncing. Breast buds pressed against her dress. A few years later, this child, sent to lie with one virile black man, then another, then another, would become a breeder, valued by her owner but pitied by her fellow slaves—her voice and joy reduced to a sigh and a moan.
Which slave, I wondered, did Massa choose first when he roamed from cabin to cabin? The delicate woman with European features? The sinewy woman who did not tire? Or the one who had already known many men?
I do not recall when I first heard the word rape. Certainly not from my mother. But it lurked in the shallowest shadows of history whenever Mom—calling forth a multigenerational memory, long steeped in a thick amalgam of sorrow, fear, resignation, and anger—referred to any abusive white man as “the massa.” From slavery to Reconstruction to the Jim Crow era and beyond, black women, especially southern black women, were vulnerable.
In his 1920 essay “The Damnation of Women,” W.E.B. Du Bois writes:
I shall forgive the white 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 well-lost 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.
Neither Du Bois nor my mother used the word rape. Du Bois spoke out in anger and refused to forgive the South’s abuse of black women “to prostitute to its lust.” But when Mom said, “That’s the way it was then,” there was resignation and acceptance behind her words.
In the post–Civil War South, the massa had lost the right to roam freely from cabin to cabin, but the “insulting of the black womanhood” did not end. It was not rare for southern white men to view my grandfather’s sisters, my grandmother, my mother, and other black women of their generations as unworthy of respect. Mom might not have allowed herself to use the word rape even in her thoughts, but she knew what could happen. She also knew that if she became a victim of this American “tradition,” there would be little she could do about it.
What had Mom felt as a young woman living in the South when a white man eyed her tan skin, slender legs, and full breasts? What did he see? A beautiful woman? A black woman? Which made him more predatory?
In 1992, shortly before heading to Virginia to begin my research, I called my mother.
“You’ve always been so proud of descending from President Madison,” I said. “So was Gramps. I don’t understand why.”
“You don’t?”
“No. President Madison and his father were rapists.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Rapists. Mom, we’ve been talking around this for years.”
For several moments, neither of us said anything. Although Mom had never called either Madison a rapist, I had assumed she recognized, if only subconsciously, that that’s what they were. But now I was not sure. This was the first time she had heard me use that term, but Mom had often said to me, “You shouldn’t think ill of them. That’s just the way it was.” She was defending them from an accusation I had not yet made.
“Maybe they loved them,” she finally said now.
“No. The Madisons loved their wives. They used their slaves.”
“At least the Madisons were accomplished and intelligent, especially the son. He became the president, you know. It wasn’t just anyone.”
Shortly after that conversation with my mother, I met Nola, an old friend, for breakfast in a tiny storefront café not far from where I worked. We were the only customers. Looking up from the plastic-coated menu, she asked, “How’s your research going?”
“Well, right now I’m stuck.”
“On what?”
“I don’t know what kind of rape Mandy and Coreen had to deal with.”
“What kind of rape?” Nola dropped her menu onto the Formica table. “Does it matter?”
“I think so. I think it makes a difference whether they were physically attacked or whether they just gave in to the wishes of their masters because they had no choice.”
“You shouldn’t say ‘just’ gave in to.” She sat upright; her eyes focused on mine. “I know exactly what rape is,” she said. “You don’t just give in to it.”
I looked into my friend’s face and saw all of the pain and shame my mother and the generations before her had tried to deny. I also saw anger. I had known this talented, outgoing, attractive woman nearly fifteen years, but I didn’t know Nola had been raped. Ashamed of being ignorant and insensitive, I could say only “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m not upset with you,” she said, reaching for my hand.
I searched for words that seemed adequate.
“Phil,” she said simply.
“Your ex-husband?”
“That’s the one,” she answered, trying to sound upbeat.
We were sitting by a window, and the white morning light streaming through it washed the color out of her face; she looked like an overexposed photograph. Staring over my shoulder at the street scene behind me, Nola said, “From practically day one of our marriage, he slept with anything and everything in a skirt, but even so”—tears welled up in her eyes—“Phil forced himself on me once, twice, sometimes three times every . . . single . . . day.”
I moved my chair to her side of the table and put my arm around her shoulders. The waitress had started toward us across the linoleum floor but turned back to the kitchen.
“We stayed married for over ten years, and it never stopped. Finally, my cousin . . . you’ve met Emma . . . and my mom and dad came and got the kids and me. Abducted us, actually. Daddy—he had always taken such good care of me until I insisted I could take care of myself—found an apartment for us. I felt like a fool, but he never said anything about my mistakes. And there were many. My judgment when it came to men was worse than bad.”
I handed her a packet of tissues, and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
“This thing with Phil wasn’t about sex,” she explained. “This was about power and craziness. He was much bigger than me, and years later, I figured out he was psychotic. I was hurting, and I won’t ever be able to forget that, but while we were still married, I thought I had found a way of taking whatever he could dish out. I would lie there, kneel there, stand there, squat there, sit there, or lean there and think about my beautiful children. I thought about what they were doing in school, in life, what they needed from me, what I could give them. Sex with that crazy man became an out-of-body experience. Even the time he broke the fingers on my right hand—on purpose,” she said. “I would become someone else. Anyone else. And I took myself somewhere else. Anywhere else. It wasn’t me. I wasn’t there when he raped my body.”
Nola’s eyes, though red with hurt and rage, were strong with self-awareness. Then she smiled. The pain was not behind her, but now she was thriving in a new marriage.
I was surprised at the ease with which she answered my unvoiced question.
“You’re wondering why I stayed with Phil so long.” Laughing, she said, “I spent a lot of bad hours and a lot of good money
on that one myself. Ten years is a lifetime when every day is filled with fear of being murdered. He swore he’d kill me if I left him, and I had no reason not to believe him. When I said the marriage vows, I entered a covenant with God. Then my husband became the father of my children, and I wanted them to grow up in a complete family. He never laid a hand on the kids. I didn’t realize how much they were being hurt by what they saw him do to me.
“But I didn’t stay just for them. I truly believed that if I just tried harder, if I did things a little better, I could make him love me. And I couldn’t give up because that meant defeat, so I baked bread, hand-washed his jeans, served him breakfast in bed. I took care of the children and worked two jobs while he hung out at home, but my husband thought that, as my husband, he deserved more and more and more, everything. We both came to believe that he was omnipotent and that I, failing to meet his needs, most of which neither of us could figure out, had failed as a woman. We believed I deserved to be raped.”
I lay in bed that night replaying Nola’s words. On the face of it, her circumstances were different from Mandy’s and Coreen’s. Nola was married, her children would never be sold away from her, and she lived in a home she and her husband could call their own. In that sense, Nola was a free woman. The Thirteenth Amendment promised her freedom, but my friend had been held in bondage.
Lying there listening to the branches of the crabapple tree scrape across my bedroom window, I imagined the massa’s “visit”:
The dark contour of a well-dressed man appeared in the cabin doorway; his acres of tobacco, his small cotton field, his ironworks, his brandy stills, his mansion, were not visible from her vantage point as she lay on her pallet on the dirt floor.
He stepped into the cabin.
He walked across the small, hot room and stood over her.
The Other Madisons Page 12