Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (49 page)

Other studies in my files, some extending back to 1890, show the same discriminatory pattern. Heavier sentences imposed on blacks for raping white women is an incontestable historic fact.

This chapter is going to concern itself with interracial rape as a national obsession, and by that I mean the phenomenon of black men raping white women, both fear of and fact, how the meaning of the act is understood by white men and black men, and how the

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white woman and the black woman have been used by both as a pawn in the cause of politics, ideology and power.

In the slaveholding South, revolt and rape by dehumanized black hordes was the classic white male nightmare. The purity of white womanhood, enforced by social mores as compelling as the whip, was as critical a touchstone of white masculinity as the system of slaveholding itself. Aware of his wholesale transgression against the black female slave, which he refused to conceptualize as criminal rape, the slaveholder was eternally vigilant against a re verse of the syndrome. Rumors and scare stories of slave conspir acies usually featured the rape of white women as the ultimate purpose of the slaves' revenge.

"The entire Negro population, at least the greater part, had conspired to assault their masters on a certain night, massacre all the population [and] make the women either their slaves or use them to gratify their desires," a soldier in Charleston wrote in his diary in
1736
af ter listening to the local gossip-but historians have been unable to verify this alleged Charleston conspiracy. "Af ter confessing the conspiracy, each of them declar[ ed] whose wife, daughter or sister he had fixed on for his future bedfellow," a magazine reported in
1757,
but no documentation exists for this conspiracy either.

In fact, organized slave revolts in the South were few and there is no evidence that rape played a part in any of them, perhaps because those that did get beyond the planning stage were quickly snuffed out.

William Styron was roundly criticized by several black writers a few years ago for injecting a "thwarted rape" motif into his fictional account of the Nat Turner rebellion. "Infuriating sexual slander of the Negro male," Mike Thelwell called it, continuing, "this kind of neurotic frustration finds expression in solitary, sui cidal acts of violence, not in planned, public, political acts of rebellion." A noble revolutionary sentiment from Thelwell, and accurate enough in Nat Turner's case, but as the quixotic Marxist historian Eugene Genovese suggested in his own countercriticism of the anti-Styron broadside, Styron's literary license is not without some basis in fact if one wants to extend one's horizon to Haiti, where the slave rebellion led by Toussaint L'Ouverture was par tially successful. Toussaint's black biographer, C. L. R. James, wrote of the Haitian revolt, "The slaves destroyed tirelessly . . .
·
.

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They, whose women had undergone countless violations, violated all the women who fell into their hands, often on the bodies of their still bleeding husbands, fathers and brothers."

But this wasn't the pattern in the American South, except in the morbid imagination of the slaveholder. Individual acts of rape by black slaves upon white women, "solitary, suicidal acts of vio lence," did occur, and taking the broadest possible perspective on the nature of rebellion, they were probably as "political" as any individual act of slave arson, for a slave might have a firm under standing of what constituted hit-and-run damage to the white man's property, being property himself.

Sifting through the state of Virginia's records of slaves sen tenced to death during the eighty-year period prior to emancipa tion, Ulrich B. Phillips, the grand old man of American slavery historians, found
105
convictions for sexual assault: 73 for rape and

32
for attempted rape. Two of the rape victims had been free mulatto women; all the rest were white. "That no slave women were mentioned among the victims is of course far from proving that these were never violated," Phillips carefully noted, "for such offenses appear to have been largely lef t to the private cognizance of the masters."*

Harking back to concepts of retribution found in early English law, the Southern slaveholders wrote their codes to include the penalty of castration. Once legal punishment for a variety of slave crimes, including running away, when the colony of Virginia de cided to phase out dismemberment in 769, it kept the penalty on the books for slaves convicted of raping white women. Among those troubled by the castration statute was Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to James Madison from Paris in 786 advising him of French opinion: "The principle of retaliation is much criticized here, par ticularly in the case of Rape. They think the punishment indecent and unjustifiable. I should be for altering it, but for a different reason: that is on account of the temptation women would be under to make it the instrument of vengeance against an incon stant lover, and of disappointment to a rival."

*
During the same time span Phillips found 346 convictions for murder ( 85 of the victims were fellow slaves; 39 of the murderers were women ) ,
2
57 convictions for burglary,
90
for arson (
29
of the arsonists were women ) , and
111
convictions for miscellaneous assault.

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But castration was not the usual punishment. Throughout most of the.South's slaveholding history a simple, mandatory sen tence of death awaited the slave found guilty of interracial rape. Black freedmen found guilty of raping white women fared little better than slaves. The i86o Code of Virginia provided a maxi mum penalty of
20
years in jail for any white rapist but a freedman could be punished by death, even for attempted rape. ( During Reconstruction, Virginia's statutes were amended to remove the blatant race distinction.)

And beyond the legal apparatus stood the lynch mob, the unveiled expression of violent retaliation reminiscent of the blood vengeance codes of prehistory. The role that lynching was later to play in American history as the chief extralegal weapon for intimi dating Southern blacks was modeled af ter the pattern set during the slaveholding years when rape or suspicion of rape was one sure way to call the citizenry to arms. A Mississippi newspaper editorial ized in i843 after a band of whites pursued and hanged two slaves who had raped a farmer's wife, "We have ever been and now are opposed to any kind of punishment being administered under the statutes of Judge Lynch; but . . . a due regard for . . . all that is most dear to man in the domestic circles of life impels us to acknowledge the fact that if the perpetrators of this excessively revolting crime had been burned alive . . . their fate would have been too good for such diabolical and inhuman wretches."

What precisely was it that was dear to man in the domestic circles of his life? A slaveholder's wife once blurted out to Harriet Martineau that she was nothing more than the "chief slave of the harem" on her husband's plantation. Legal bearer of his children, prized decorative ornament, sometime companion, bestowed with the external trappings of privilege but denied real power, the white woman was her husband's choicest piece of property. Valued for her chastity, access to her sexuality was wholly owned by the same white master who could daily violate the sexual integrity of his black female slave. Chastity of the white woman was a serious matter that the rule of marriage required to ensure legal heirs, just as a corresponding denial of chastity and legal marriage to the black woman gave the slaveholder clear title to ownership of all children born of slaves.

White men, whether they were slaveholders or not, viewed white women as a private fief of less than equal beings. A white

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woman could not vote, hold office, or sit on a jury; she could not attain a higher education, and she could not own land, slaves or money in her own right after marriage. The highly vaunted pedes tal on which she was placed had a hard-rock base of economic dependence, and the fastest way to get knocked off that pedestal was to show an inclination for sexual freedom. Evidence of a white woman's sexual independence was considered a direct challenge to the white man's inviolable holdings, and when a white woman was discovered to have "had connection" with a black
1
.Jan in voluntary association, the collective white male mind felt it had sustained a property loss.
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