Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (34 page)

On the way we captured one white man and two white women. We released them at the end of three days. They were treated kindly. The women were not insulted. Can the white soldiers tell me of one time when Indian women were taken prisoners and held three days and then released without being insulted? Were the Nez Perce women who fell into the hands of General Howard's soldiers treated with as much respect?
I
deny that a Nez Perce was ever guilty of such a crime.

But the Indian woman herself never spoke.

The American experience of the slave South, which spanned two centuries, is a perfect study of rape in all its complexities, for the black woman's sexual integrity was deliberately crushed in order that slavery might profitably endure.

In contrast to rape during the Indian wars, which was largely casual and retaliatory-men getting even with men through the convenient vehicle of a woman's body-rape under the Patriarchal Institution, as it was named by the patriarchs, was built into the system. The white man wanted the Indian's land, but the coin he extracted from blacks was forced labor. This diff erence in pur pose affected the white man's relations with, and use of, the black woman. Rape in slavery was more than a
.
chance tool of violence. It was an institutional crime, part and parcel of the white man's subjugation of a people for economic and psychological gain.

The Patriarchal Institution took the form of white over black but it also took the form of male over female, or more specifically, of white male over black female. Unlike the Indian woman who was peripheral to the conquest of land, the black woman was critical to slavery. She was forced into dual exploitation as both laborer and reproducer. Her body, in all of its parts, belonged outright to her white master. She had no legal right of refusal, and if the mere recognition of her physical bondage was not enough, the knife, the whip and the gun were always there to be used against her. Forced sexual exploitation of the black woman under slavery was no offhand enterprise. Total control over her reproduc tive system meant a steady supply of slave babies, and slave chil-

i
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dren, when they reached the age of six or eight, were put to work; it did not matter whether they were full-blooded or mulatto.

An important psychologic advantage, which should not be underestimated, went hand in glove with the economic. Easy ac cess to numerous, submissive female bodies-and individual resis tance was doomed-aff orded swaggering proof of masculinity to slaveholding males, while it conversely reduced and twisted the black man's concept of
his
role.

"Sexually as well as in every other way, Negroes were utterly subordinated," writes historian Winthrop D. Jordan of the slave South. "White men extended their dominion over the Negroes to the bed, where the sex act itself served as a ritualistic re-enactment of the daily pattern of social dominance." Jordan's words are too temperate. "Bed" is as much a euphemism as not, and "ritualistic re-enactment" implies a stately minuet of manners-a vastly in adequate description of the brutal white takeover and occupation of the black woman's body.

"Lawdy, lawdy, them was tribbolashuns! " an eighty-seven-year old ex-slave by the name of Martha Jackson told a recorder for the Federal Works Project in Alabama ( who wrote down her words in an approximation of her dialect ) . "Wunner dese here womans was my Antie en she say dad she skacely call to min' he e'r whoppin' her, 'case she was er breeder woman en' brought in chillum ev'y twelve mont's jes lak a cow bringin' in a calf."

Martha Jackson's choice of imagery was grounded in the real ities of slavery. Female slaves were expected to "breed"; some were retained expressly for that purpose. In the lexicon of slavery, "breeder woman," "childbearing woman," "too old to breed" and "not a breeding woman" were common descriptive terms. In country breeding was crucial to the planter economy after the African slave trade was banned in i807, and the slave woman's value increased in accordance with her ability to produce healthy offspring. Domestic production of slave babies for sale to other slave states became a small industry in the fertile upper South. In fact, it was observed to be the only
reliably
profitable slave-related enterprise. Quite an opposite state of affairs had existed in the North before abolition, where sla:very had never been profitable. In colonial Massachusetts, one observer has written, slave babies when weaned "were given away like puppies." But the state of Virginia annually exported between six thousand and twenty thousand homegrown slaves to the deeper South, where the land, the climate and a harsher work load took precedence over fecundity. The Virginia-reared slave, like Virginia leaf tobacco, was always in great demand.

A member of the Virginia legislature used revealing language when he addressed that patrician body in
1831 :

It has always (perhaps erroneously ) been considered by steady and old-fashioned people, that the owner of land had a reasonable right to its annual profits; the owner of orchards, to their annual fruits; the owner of broodmares, to their product; and the owner of female slaves to their increase . . . and I do not hesitate to say, that in its increase consists much of our wealth.

The fellow from Virginia, Mr. Gholson, was attempting to make the point tha t a slaveholder would not mistreat a female slave as
he would not
mistreat
his
broodmare, since the "increase" of each needed a period of nurture in order to show a profit.
In
return for the production of slave babies, the female knowingly bartered for more food and a reduced work load in the weeks before and af ter birth. But despite Mr. Gholson's protestations, a lightened work load was not an automatic
quid
pro quo.

Nehemiah Caulkins, a white carpenter who worked for a time on a North Carolina rice plantation, presented this picture of breeder women in an antislavery pamphlet of
1839:

One day the owner ordered the women into the barn, he then went in among them, whip in hand, and told them he meant to flog them all to death; they immediately began to cry out, "What have I done Massa? What have I done Massa?" He replied, "D-n you, I will let you know what you have done, you don't breed, I haven't had a young one from one of you for several months." They told him they could not breed while they had to work in the rice ditches. (The rice grounds are low and marshy, and have to be drained, and while digging or clearing the ditches, the women had to work in mud and water from one to two feet in depth; they were obliged to draw up and secure their frocks about their waist, to keep them out of water, in this manner they frequently had to work from daylight in the morning till it was so dark they could see no longer.) Af ter swearing and threatening for some time, he told them to tell the overseer's wife, when they got in that way, and he would put them upon the land to work.

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OUR WILL

The Georgia journal of Fanny Kemble, whose husband owned a pair of cotton and rice plantations, records this entry:

The women who visited me yesterday evening were all in the family way, and came to entreat of me to have the sentence (what else can I call it? ) modified which condemns them to assume their labor of hoeing in the field three weeks after their confinement. They knew, of course, that I cannot interfere with their appointed labor, and therefore their sole entreaty was that I would use my in fluence with Mr. -[Butler, her husband) to obtain for them a month's respite from labor in the field af ter childbearing.

Fanny Kemble was unsuccessful in her intercessionary mission.

Breeder women were sometimes blatantly advertised as such, for if they were "proven," they could command a higher price. The following advertisement from the Charleston, South Carolina, Mercury became an abolitionist classic:

NEGROES FOR SALE-A Girl about twenty years of age ( raised in Virginia) and her two female children, one four and the other two years old-is remarkably strong and healthy-never having had a day's sickness, with the exception of the small pox, in her life. The children are fine and healthy. She is very prolific in her generating qualities, and affords a rare opportunity to any person who wishes to raise a family of strong and healthy servants for their own use. Any person wishing to purchase will please leave their address at the Mercury office.

It
mattered little to the slaveholder who did the actual im pregnating, since the "increase" belonged to him by law. Paternity was seldom entered in the slaveholder's record book, and when it did appear, it was strictly for purposes of identification. The female was often arbitrarily assigned a sexual partner or "husband" and ordered to mate. Her own preferences in this most intimate of matters may or may not have been taken into account, depending on the paternalistic inclinations of her master. "I wish the three girls you purchest had been all grown," an overseer wrote to an absent master. "They wold then bin a wife a pese for Harise
&
King

&
Nathan. Harris has Jane for a wife and Nathan has Edy. But King
&
Nathan had sum difuculty hoo wold have Edy. I promist

King that I wold in clever to git you to bey a nother woman sow he might have a wife at home."

Sexual activity for the male slave after the day's work was done was considered by the slave and master to be in the nature of a reward, but it is difficult to make such a generalization for the female. The accepted modem authority on slavery, Kenneth M. Stampp, writes, "Having to submit to the superior power of their masters, many slaves were extremely aggressive toward each other."
It
is consistent with the nature of oppression that within an op pressed group, men abuse women. "We don't care what they do when their tasks are over-we lose sight of them till next day," one planter wrote. "Their morals and manners are in their own keep ing. The men may have, for instance, as many wives as they please, so long as they do not quarrel about such matters."

Another slave owner kept marital law and order in the follow ing fashion, as recorded in his diary: "Flogged Joe Goodwyn and ordered him to go back to his wife. Dito Gabriel and Molly and ordered them to come together again. Separate Moses and Anny finally. And flogged Tom Kollock [for] interfering with Maggy Cambell, Sullivan's wife." The narrative of Charles Ball,
Fif ty
Years
in
Chains, tells of a slave woman who was forced to live with a fellow slave whom she thoroughly detested and feared-and who never. stopped reminding her that in Africa he had ten wives! That warm, sustained relationships
did
develop between male and female slaves in bondage is a most profound testament to what can only be called humanity, which everything in slave life conspired to destroy.