A History of the Wife (34 page)

Although black weddings often followed the pattern of white cere- monies, from the white wedding dress to the reading of Scripture, there was one particular feature handed down from one generation of slaves to the next: the bride and groom jumped or stepped over a broom. The black custom of jumping over the broom—the equivalent of “tying the knot”—was prevalent throughout the South, though its exact origins are uncertain. Mary Reynolds, a former slave from Louisiana, left behind this picture of the broom ceremony. “[M]assa and missy marries us same as all the niggers. They stands inside the house with a broom held crosswise of the door and we stands outside... and we steps over the broom. Now that’s all they was to the marryin’.”
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Cato Carter, an ex-slave from Alabama, made this wry observation about black mar- riages. “[M]ostly they jus’ jumped over a broom and that made ’em married. Sometimes one the white folks read a li’l out of the Scriptures to ’em and they felt more married.”
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Once married, a slave couple usually lived together in their own log cabin or shack, that is, if they belonged to the same master. Most spouses were able to share the same dwelling, but if they belonged to different owners, living together could be problematic. One ex-slave from Texas recalled that her father lived on a neighboring plantation and could come to see her mama only on Wednesday and Saturday nights. Another former slave said her husband had to go back to to his

owners after the wedding, but was allowed to come to her on Saturday nights and stay overnight till Sunday.
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Some husbands were allowed to visit only once every two weeks, but as one black woman remembered: “him sees us more often that that, ’cause him sneak off every time him have de chance.”
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Slaves, like free people, considered marriage a bind- ing commitment; when the marriage was not interrupted through the death or sale of a slave, it was not uncommon for it to last twenty or more years, as historian Herbert Gutman has shown in his study of South Carolina plantation life.
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It is difficult to know how many slave brides were pregnant or already mothers when they married. Contemporary white witnesses suggested that most slave girls were sexually promiscuous by the time they were fifteen or sixteen, about the time of first menstruation for nineteenth-century American women. But Gutman’s work offers a dif- ferent interpretation of black female sexuality. He distinguishes between promiscuity and prenuptial intercourse leading to marriage when the girl became pregnant, following a common pattern in many premodern agricultural societies. And, based on responses from the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission of 1863, he has come to the conclusion that “fidelity was expected from slave men and women after marriage.”
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Although we cannot know how many slaves lived up to that expectation, monogamous sexuality was reinforced in black com- munities by the slaves themselves, by their churches, and often by their masters and mistresses. Frances Butler Leigh, a former slave owner, observed shortly after 1865 that blacks “did not consider it wrong for a girl to have a child before she married, but afterwards were extremely severe upon anything like infidelity on her part.”
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Husbands, too, were expected to be monogamous, but were less stigmatized if they strayed. The written and oral histories of former slaves suggest that marriage relations varied enormously from one couple to the next, not only because of external structures, but also because of interpersonal dynamics. There were stable unions and unstable unions; spouses bound by affection and spouses split by animosity; good marriages, bad marriages, and indifferent ones. Wives spoke of their former and pres- ent husbands with diverse sentiments, from love and gratitude to hatred and revulsion. Children, too, remembered their parents’ mar- riages with a wide variety of emotions, though positive feelings tend to predominate, especially for mothers. In many instances the children

simply did not know their fathers: “don’t know nothin’ bout my paw” was a common refrain in oral histories, often because the father had been sold when the child was small. When a father was present, he was the undisputed head of the family and commanded submission from his wife and children, just as white men did in their families.

Yet on the whole, mothers figure more prominently than fathers in slave narratives, for all the obvious reasons. Mothers were considered the essential parent by most slaves and their masters, and families tended to be matrifocal. In fact, if the Virginia paradigm can be applied to other states, it was common for masters compiling lists of slaves to identify a child by its mother, and rarely to add the name of the father.
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Certainly during the first years of a baby’s life, a mother was essential to its survival; all mothers breast-fed their babies, even when they were nursing white babies at the same time. As one mother memorably put it: “Sometimes I have a white’un pullin’ de one side and a black one de other.”
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A nursing mother was dependent on the vagaries of her owner’s whim as to whether she even had the time to breast-feed her own baby regularly. One slave assigned to field work sadly remem- bered: “I’d leave my baby cryin’ in de yard.”
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Others like Charlotte Beverley from Texas were more fortunate. She painted the picture of a kindly mistress, with no children of her own, who saw to it that all the babies were properly cared for in a nursery. “Sometimes they’s as many as fifty cradles with little nigger babies in ’em and the mistus, she look after them and take care of them, too. She turn them and dry them her- self.... I’d blow the horn for the mudders of the little babies to come in from the fields and nurse ’em, in morning and afternoon.”
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Whether they were wives or single women, with or without babies, female slaves were often subject to sexual advances from their masters and overseers. Betty Powers from Texas spoke bluntly on the subject: “ ’De overseer and white mens took ’vantage of de women like dey wants to. De woman better not make no fus ’bout sich. If she do, it am de whippin’ for her.”
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Anne Clark, a former slave from Mississippi, reported succinctly: “My mama had two white chillen by marster and they were sold as slaves.”
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Auntie Thomas Johns, only two when her mother was freed, heard tales during her childhood of her mother’s Texas master, Major Odom, who was unmarried and “had a nigger woman, Aunt Phyllis she was called, that he had some children by.” The major had a reputation for being good to his slaves, not only the five

“nearly white” sons he had with Aunt Phyllis, but also the “nigger black” child she had with another man. “When she was drunk or mad she’d say she thought more of her black chile than all the others.”
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Slave women who resisted their masters’ sexual coercion could end up suffering even worse punishment than rape, as in the following story told by a former Virginia slave, Fanny Berry, about another slave named Sukie. “Ole Marsa was always tryin’ to make Sukie his gal.” One day when she was making lye soap and he approached her, “she gave him a shove an’ push his hindparts down in de hot pot o’ Soap. Soap was near to bilin’, an’ it burn him near to death. . . . Marsa never did bother slave gals no mo’.” But a few days later Sukie was sent to the auction block.
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If a slave got up the courage to complain to her mistress, the latter might confront the man in question, but some wives were so intimi- dated by their husbands that they were too frightened to defend a sex- ually abused girl. Former slave Virginia Hayes Shepherd reported that when a slave named Diana asked her mistress to protect her from being raped by her husband, the mistress sympathized with the girl, but was afraid to confront him, lest he beat her and “pull her hair out.”
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Harriet Jacobs, a teenaged slave, was so hounded by her master, Dr. Flint, that Mrs. Flint got whiff of his intentions and called the girl to her room for an inquiry. After making the girl swear on a Bible to tell the truth, Mrs. Flint commanded: “Now take this stool, sit down, look me directly in the face, and tell me all that has passed between your master and you.” Harriet’s account of the master’s repeated attempts to seduce her brought tears and groans to her mistress’s eyes. “She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy.”
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Even though she promised to protect the girl, Mrs. Flint was so enraged and jealous that she ended up turning against the slave girl, as well as her husband. The worst fear for a slave was that she or her husband or children might be sold separately, and the family broken up. One former slave girl from Maryland was terrified when her relatively decent master took her “to see how de mean slave owners raffles off de fathers and de hus- ban’s and de mothers and de wives and de chillen. He takes us ’round to de big platform and a white man git up dere with de slave and start hollerin’ for bids, and de slave stands dere jus’ pitiful like, and when somebody buy de slave all de folks starts yellin’ and a cryin’.”
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Another

remembered how her parents had been separated: “One mornin’ we is all herded up and mammy am cryin’ and say dey gwine to Texas, but can’t take papa. He don’t ’long to dem. Dat de lastes’ time we ever seed papa.”
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Fanny Kemble, an English actress married to a very wealthy Ameri- can plantation owner, wrote movingly of her attempt to prevent the breakup of one slave family. She had come south with her two small daughters and her husband, Pierce Mease Butler of Philadelphia, heir to large slaveholding properties on two Georgia islands, in the winter of 1838–1839. From a stay of almost four months, she kept a journal (published in 1863) that included the following incident.

We have, as a sort of under nursemaid and assistant . . . a young woman named Psyche. . . . She cannot be much over twenty, has a very pretty figure, a graceful, gentle deportment, and a face which, but for its color (she is a dingy mulatto), would be pretty. . . . She has two nice little children under six years old. . . . [T]his poor woman is the wife of one of Mr. [Butler’s] slaves, a fine, intelligent, active, excellent young man.
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It turned out that Psyche and her husband belonged to different masters: while Joe belonged to Mr. Butler, Psyche and her children belonged to the overseer. Fanny Kemble was horrified to learn that her husband, wishing to please a departing administrator, “
had made him a present
of the man Joe,” who would then be taken by his new owner to Alabama. Small wonder that Joe was in a state of frenzy, “his voice broken with sobs and almost inarticulate with passion, reiterat- ing his determination never to leave this plantation, never to go to Alabama, never to leave his old father and mother, his poor wife and children.”

Fanny appealed to her husband, “for his own soul’s sake, not to com- mit so great a cruelty.” Though he appeared unresponsive to her vehe- ment entreaties (remember, she had been a famous actress!), the story ended well enough. Joe was not sent to Alabama, and Mr. Butler bought Psyche and her children from the overseer so the family could stay together. But as Fanny Kemble reflected, the situation would surely have ended differently “on plantations where there is no crazy English- woman to weep, and entreat, and implore, and upbraid for them, and

no master willing to listen to such appeals.”

Despite this incident of spousal reunification on the slave level, and spousal reconciliation on the level of their owners, the marriage of Fanny Kemble and Pierce Butler was not destined to survive. Their irreconcilable differences, not only on the question of slavery but also on the subject of marriage, were widely publicized ten years later in a bitter divorce. Mr. Butler claimed that the failure of his marriage was due to the “peculiar views which were entertained by Mrs. Butler on the subject of marriage... she held that marriage should be a companion- ship on equal terms.” And in support of his statement, he published a letter she had written him much earlier in which she had contested the idea that he should have control over her. Mr. Butler’s condemnation of the “the error of this principle of equal rights in marriage” merely reflected the received wisdom of his day, especially in the South.
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When the couple was granted a divorce in 1849, he was awarded cus- tody of the children in accordance with Anglo-American law and cus- tom.

The story of Fanny Kemble belies simplistic interpretations of conju- gal life in the South. It shows how one Englishwoman’s attempts to sub- vert the system contributed to the loss of her husband and her children. It shows how white women’s lives were intertwined with those of their slaves. And it shows that marriages—then as now—can become battle- grounds for spouses committed to opposing ideologies and different causes.

How many Victorian marriages were riven by such internal wars? Even today, when couples are less reluctant to advertise their discon- tents, it is very difficult to gauge the general level of marital discord. Anne Firor Scott, in her classic book
The Southern Lady
, listed a number of women’s major grievances, including worries over continual child- bearing and the oppressive weight of their domestic responsibilities, including the burden of owning and overseeing slaves.
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Some Southern women went so far as to publicly oppose the institu- tion of slavery. In a February 1839 petition to the Georgia Legislature published in the
Savannah Telegraph
, 319 women expressed their prayers for the abolition of slavery throughout the state. A committee of the Georgia legislature called the petition “an unwarranted interference in subjects that should more properly belong to their fathers, husbands and brothers,” and advised the women that it “would confer more real

benefit upon society, if they hereafter confined their attention to mat- ters of a domestic nature, and would be more solicitous to mend the garments of their husbands and children, than to patch the breaches of the laws and Constitution.”
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