Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (37 page)

Sexual exploitation of black women by white men was under stood as one of the evils of slavery by the abolitionist movement, even though abolitionists were unable to bring themselves to call it rape. Specific cases of concubinage and "amalgamation" reported by travelers through the South were incorporated, with appropriate moral outrage, into
American Slavery As
It
Is:
Testimony
of a Thousand
Witnesses,
compiled and collated by the Grimke sisters and Theodore Weld, Angelina Grimke's husband, in
1839.
The Grimke testimony, and that of Margaret Douglass, formed the backbone of an
1860
antislavery pamphlet edited by Lydia Maria Child. The abolitionist women, in dealing with the sexual behavior of men, were treading on dangerous ground, bound by conventions that decreed that a man's private life was beyond the pale of political scrutiny. "We forbear to lif t the veil of private life any higher," wrote Angelina Grimke, whose brother had sired mulatto slave children. "Let these few hints suffice to give you some idea of what is daily passing behind that curtain which has been so care fully drawn before the scenes of domestic life in slaveholding America."

The "few hints" of which Angelina Grimke wrote and spoke were scandalous enough for the times. "The character of the white ladies of the South, as well as the ladies of color, seems to have been discussed, and the editor of the Courier was of the opinion that the reputation of his paper, and the morals of its readers, might be injuriously affected by publishing the debate," a North ern newspaper reported af ter a Grimke speech-neatly turning the

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AGAINST OUR WILL

crime of men into a matter of the "character" of women, in the age old tradition.

In the winter of 1838-1839, while Weld and the Grimkes were compiling their documentary record of slavery in New York, the English actress Fanny Kemble was in residence on a Georgia island plantation, recording her shocked observations in a journal that remained suppressed for twenty-five years. The celebrated and strong-minded Miss Kemble had inadvisedly married a young Philadelphian, Pierce Butler, who inherited a pair of cotton and rice plantations employing more than one thousand slaves. The mar riage went badly, but it proved invaluable to history, for Fanny Kemble traveled with her husband to Georgia and wrote down what she saw in the form of letters to a friend.

As Fanny Kemble made the acquaintance of slaves on her husband's plantation, it dawned on her that the complexion of some of them was decidedly light, and for a very specific reason the plantation's overseer, John King. She described the slave woman Betty:

Of this woman's life on the plantation I subsequently learned the following circumstances. She was the wife of head man Frank

. . . the head driver-second in command to the overseer. His wife (BettyJ-a tidy, trim intelligent woman with a pretty figure . . . was taken from him
by
the overseer . . . and she had a son by him whose straight features and diluted color . . . bear witness to his Yankee descent. I do not know how Jong Mr. King's occupation of Frank's wife continued, or how the
latter
endured the wrong done
to him
[italics mine]. This outrage upon
this
man's
rights
(italics mine] was perfectly notorious among all the slaves; and his hopef ul offspring, Renty, a11ud[ed) to his superior birth on one occasion.

Betty was not the only slave on the Butler plantation whom the white overseer, King, forced into sexual service, Fanny Kemble discovered.

Before reaching the house I was stopped by one of our multi tudinous Jennies with a request for some meat, and that I would help her with some clothes for Ben and Daphne, of whom she had the sole charge; these are two extremely pretty and interesting look ing mulatto children, whose resemblance to Mr. King had induced me to ask Mr. Butler, when I first saw them, if he did not think they

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must be his children. He said they were certainly like him, but Mr. King did not acknowledge the relationship. I asked Jenny who their mother was. "Minda." "Who their father?" "Mr. King." . . . "Who told you so?" "Minda, who ought to know." "Mr. King denies it." "That's because he never has looked upon them, nor done a thing for them." "Well, but he acknowledged Renty as his son, why should he deny these?" "Because old master was here then when Renty was born, and he made Betty tell all about it, and Mr. King had to own it; but nobody knows anything about this, and so he denies it."

The Butler plantation operated under absentee ownership for most of the year and the white overseer, King, was lef t in charge as a virtual dictator. The power of his station, and its sexual privi leges, extended to those directly below him in the chain of com mand, the black drivers, who themselves were slaves. Owners, overseers, drivers, neighboring white men-all could force the

black woman against her will, and
she
was held morally responsible

for the injury done to her. Fanny Kemble herself started from this premise, but rejected it in time.

Quizzing more of her husband's slaves about the paternity of their offspring and hearing the names King and Walker ( a white mill hand ) and Morris ( a black driver ) repeated by many of them, she recorded:

Almost beyond my patience with this string of detestable de tails, I exclaimed-foolishly enough, heaven knows- "Ahl but don't you know-did nobody ever tell or teach any of you that it is a sin to live with men who are not your husbands?" Alas, Elizabeth, what could the poor creature answer but what she did, seizing me at the same time vehemently by the wrist: "Oh yes, missis, we know-we know all about dat well enough; but we do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from de whip; when he made me follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no? He have strength to make me." I have written down the woman's words; I wish I could write down the voice and look of abject misery with which they were spoken. Now you will observe that the story was not told to me as a com plaint; it was a thing long past and over, of which she only spoke in the natural course of accounting for her children to me. I make no comment; what need, or can I add, to such stories? But how is such a state of things to endure? and again, how is it to end?

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Kemble privately circulated a handwritten copy of her journal among her friends and it quickly gained an underground reputation as the most explosive insider's antislavery testament. Lydia Maria Child urged her to publish portions of it, at least, as ammunition for the abolitionist cause but Pierce Butler flatly refused permis sion. As a slaveholder he thought the journal was unseemly, which it was. As a husband he could withhold consent, by law, to any publication of his wife's, which he did. The journal, Kemble's antislavery views, and her equally daring belief in equality in mar riage, figured prominently in Butler's eventual suit for divorce. Butler won custody of their two children and the visitation-rights agreement stipulated that Kemble must do nothing to embarrass him. In
1863,
earning her own living again on the English stage, Fanny Kemble finally published her Georgia journal. By that time the War Between the States was well under way and Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, based in part on the Weld-Grimke pam phlet, had stolen much of her thunder.

The appointed roles of concubine and breeder woman forcibly progressed to outright prostitution in the last decades of slavery. Traders dispensed with pretense and openly sold their prettiest and "near-white" female chattel for sexual use on the New Orleans market. The cavalier term was "fancy girl." The place was the French Exchange in the grand rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel, and the favored hour was noon. This gaudy fillip to the slave trade was no more than a logical extension of institutional rape, the final indignity.

"Every slaveholder is the legalized keeper of a house of
ill
fame," the ex-slave and orator Frederick Douglass thundered to an abolitionist meeting in Rochester, New York, in
1850.
Douglass' understanding of the dynamics of slavery far surpassed that of any other single person. That night in Rochester he instructed his audience in the dynamics of sexual oppression.

I hold myself ready to prove that more than a miJlion of women, in the Southern States of this Union, are, by laws of the land, and through no fault of their own, consigned to a life of revolting pros titution; that, by those laws, in many of the States, if a woman, in defence of her own innocence, shall lif t her hand against the brutal aggressor, she may be lawfully put to death. I hold myself ready to prove, by the laws of slave states, that three million of the people of

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those States are utterly incapacitated to form marriage contracts. I am also prepared to prove that slave breeding is relied upon by Vir ginia as one of her chief sources of wealth.
It
has long been known that the best blood of Virginia may now be found in the slave mar kets of New Orleans.
It
is also known that slave women, who are nearly white, are sold in those markets, at prices which proclaim, trumpet-tongued, the accursed purposes to which they are to be devoted. Youth and elegance, beauty and innocence, are exposed for sale upon the auction block; while villainous monsters stand around, with pockets lined with gold, gazing with lustful eyes upon their prospective victims.

New Orleans was "fully tenfold the largest market for 'fancy girls,' " Frederic Bancrof t wrote in his unmatched study,
Slave
Trading
in the Old South.
"The prospect of great profit induced their conspicuous disp1ay." Beautiful New Orleans! Ambitious slavers chained their prettiest catches to the coffie and headed for the balmy Gulf port. Racing season and Mardi Gras were especially remunerative times. The Hotel St. Louis on Chartres Street was a beehive of activity. Bilingual auctioneers tickled the libido of the sporting men in simultaneous French and English, for a
2
percent commission. The slave women stood near the auctioneer's hammer and smiled, bedecked in bonnets and ribbons. Sales of two thou sand dollars and up were not unusual. Private rooms off the main rotunda of the Exchange were always available for the gentleman who wished
to
inspect his prospective purchase. Inspection at the French Exchange was a serious matter. "To gamblers, traders, saloonkeepers, turf men and debauchees, owning a 'fancy
girl'
was a luxurious ideal."