Words of Fire (37 page)

“In New Orleans one day in 1730 a woman slave received ‘a violent blow from a French soldier for refusing to obey him' and in her anger shouted ‘that the French should not long insult Negroes.' ”
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As it was later disclosed, she and undoubtedly many other women, had joined in a vast plan to destroy slaveholders. Along with eight men, this dauntless woman was executed. Two years later, Louisiana pronounced a woman and four men leaders of a planned rebellion. They were all executed and, in a typically savage gesture, their heads publicly displayed on poles.
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Charleston, South Carolina, condemned a black woman to die in 1740 for arson,
²⁰
a form of sabotage, as earlier noted, frequently carried out by women. In Maryland, for instance, a slave woman was executed in 1776 for having destroyed by fire her master's house, his outhouses, and tobacco house.
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In the thick of the Colonies' war with England, a group of defiant slave women and men were arrested in Saint Andrew's Parish, Georgia, in 1778. But before they were captured, they had already brought a number of slave owners to their death.
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The Maroon communities have been briefly described; from 1782 to 1784, Louisiana was a constant target of Maroon attacks. When twenty-five of this community's members were finally taken prisoner, men and women alike were all severely punished.
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As can be inferred from previous examples, the North did not escape the tremendous impact of fighting black women. In Albany, New York, two women were among three slaves executed for antislavery activities in 1794.
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The respect and admiration accorded the black woman fighter by her people is strikingly illustrated by an incident that transpired in York, Pennsylvania: when, during the early months of 1803, Margaret Bradley was convicted of attempting to poison two white people, the black inhabitants of the area revolted en masse.

A successful elimination by poisoning of several “of our respectable men” (said a letter to the governor of North Carolina) was met by the execution of four or five slaves. One was a woman who was burned alive.
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In 1810, two women and a man were accused of arson in Virginia.
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In 1811, North Carolina was the scene of a confrontation between a Maroon community and a slave-catching posse. Local newspapers reported that its members “had bid defiance to any force whatever and were resolved to stand their ground.” Of the entire community, two were killed, one wounded, and two—both women—were captured.
²⁸

Aptheker's
Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States
contains a portion of the transcript of an 1812 confession of a slave rebel in Virginia. The latter divulged the information that a black woman brought him into a plan to kill their master and that yet another black woman had been charged with concealing him after the killing occurred.
²⁹

In 1816, it was discovered that a community of three hundred escaped slaves—men, women, children—had occupied a fort in Florida. After the United States Army was dispatched with instructions to destroy the community, a ten-day siege terminated with all but forty of the three hundred dead. All the slaves fought to the very end.
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In the course of a similar, though smaller, confrontation between Maroons and a militia group (in South Carolina, 1826), a woman and a child were killed.
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Still another Maroon community was attacked in Mobile, Alabama, in 1837. Its inhabitants, men and women alike, resisted fiercely—according to local newspapers, “fighting like Spartans.”
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Convicted of having been among those who, in 1829, had been the cause of a devastating fire in Augusta, Georgia, a black woman was “executed, dissected, and exposed” (according to an English visitor). Moreover, the execution of yet another woman, about to give birth, was imminent.
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During the same year, a group of slaves, being led from Maryland to be sold in the South, had apparently planned to kill the traders and make their way to freedom. One of the traders was successfully done away with, but eventually a posse captured all the slaves. Of the six leaders sentenced to death, one was a woman. She was first permitted, for reasons of economy, to give birth to her child.
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Afterwards, she was publicly hanged.

The slave class in Louisiana, as noted earlier, was not unaware of the formidable threat posed by the black woman who chose to fight. It responded accordingly: in 1846, a posse of slave owners ambushed a community
of Maroons, killing one woman and wounding two others. A black man was also assassinated.
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Neither could the border states escape the recognition that slave women were eager to battle for their freedom. In 1850, in the state of Missouri, “about thirty slaves, men and women, of four different owners, had armed themselves with knives, clubs, and three guns and set out for a free state.” Their pursuers, who could unleash a far more powerful violence than they, eventually thwarted their plans.
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This factual survey of but a few of the open acts of resistance in which black women played major roles will close with two further events. When a Maroon camp in Mississippi was destroyed in 1857, four of its members did not manage to elude capture, one of whom was a fugitive slave woman.
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All of them, women as well as men, must have waged a valiant fight. Finally, there occurred in October, 1862, a skirmish between Maroons and a scouting party of Confederate soldiers in the state of Virginia.
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This time, however, the Maroons were the victors, and it may well have been that some of the many women helped to put the soldiers to death.

The oppression of slave women had to assume dimensions of open counterinsurgency. Against the background of the facts presented above, it would be difficult indeed to refute this contention. As for those who engaged in open battle, they were no less ruthlessly punished than slave men. It would even appear that in many cases they may have suffered penalties that were more excessive than those meted out to the men. On occasion, when men were hanged, the women were burned alive. If such practices were widespread, their logic would be clear. They would be terrorist methods designed to dissuade other black women from following the examples of their fighting sisters. If all black women rose up alongside their men, the institution of slavery would be in difficult straits.

It is against the backdrop of her role as fighter that the routine oppression of the slave woman must be explored once more. If she was burned, hanged, broken on the wheel, her head paraded on poles before her oppressed brothers and sisters, she must have also felt the edge of this counterinsurgency as a fact of her daily existence. The slave system would not only have to make conscious efforts to stifle the tendencies towards acts of the kind described above; it would be no less necessary to stave off escape attempts (escapes to Maroon country!) and all the various forms of sabotage within the system. Feigning illness was also resistance as were work slowdowns and actions destructive to the crops. The more extensive these acts, the more the slaveholder's profits would tend to diminish.

While a detailed study of the myriad modes in which this counterinsurgency
was manifested can and should be conducted, the following reflections will focus on a single aspect of the slave woman's oppression, particularly prominent in its brutality.

Much has been said about the sexual abuses to which the black woman was forced to submit. They are generally explained as an outgrowth of the male supremacy of Southern culture: the purity of white womanhood could not be violated by the aggressive sexual activity desired by the white male. His instinctual urges would find expression in his relationships with his property—the black slave woman, who would have to become his unwilling concubine. No doubt there is an element of truth in these statements, but it is equally important to unearth the meaning of these sexual abuses from the vantage point of the woman who was assaulted.

In keeping with the theme of these reflections, it will be submitted that the slave master's sexual domination of the black woman contained an unveiled element of counterinsurgency. To understand the basis for this assertion, the dialectical moments of the slave woman's oppression must be restated and their movement recaptured. The prime factor, it has been said, was the total and violent expropriation of her labor with no compensation save the pittance necessary for bare existence.

Secondly, as female, she was the housekeeper of the living quarters. In this sense, she was already doubly oppressed. However, having been wrested from passive, “feminine” existence by the sheer force of things—literally by forced labor—confining domestic tasks were incommensurable with what she had become. That is to say, by virtue of her participation in production, she would not act the part of the passive female, but could experience the same need as her men to challenge the conditions of her subjugation. As the center of domestic life, the only life at all removed from the arena of exploitation, and thus as an important source of survival, the black woman could play a pivotal role in nurturing the thrust towards freedom.

The slave master would attempt to thwart this process. He knew that as a female, this slave woman could be particularly vulnerable in her sexual existence. Although he would not pet her and deck her out in frills, the white master could endeavor to reestablish her femaleness by reducing her to the level of her
biological
being. Aspiring with his sexual assaults to establish her as a female
animal
, he would be striving to destroy her proclivities towards resistance. Of the sexual relations of animals, taken at their abstract biological level (and not in terms of their quite different social potential for human beings), Simone de Beauvoir says the following:

The act of copulation, reduced by the white man to an animal-like act, would be symbolic of the effort to conquer the resistance the black woman could unloose.

In confronting the black woman as adversary in a sexual contest, the master would be subjecting her to the most elemental form of terrorism distinctively suited for the female: rape. Given the already terroristic texture of plantation life, it would be as potential victim of rape that the slave woman would be most unguarded. Further, she might be most conveniently manipulable if the master contrived a ransom system of sorts, forcing her to pay with her body for food, diminished severity in treatment, the safety of her children, etc.

The integration of rape into the sparsely furnished legitimate social life of the slaves harks back to the feudal “right of the first night,” the
jus primae noctis
. The feudal lord manifested and reinforced his domination over the serfs by asserting his authority to have sexual intercourse with all the females. The right itself referred specifically to all freshly married women. But while the right to the first night eventually evolved into the institutionalized “virgin tax,”
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the American slaveholder's sexual domination never lost its openly terroristic character.

As a direct attack on the black female as potential insurgent, this sexual repression finds its parallels in virtually every historical situation where the woman actively challenges oppression. Thus, Frantz Fanon could say of the Algerian woman: “A woman led away by soldiers who comes back a week later—it is not necessary to question her to understand that she has been violated dozens of times.”
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In its political contours, the rape of the black woman was not exclusively an attack upon her. Indirectly, its target was also the slave community as a whole. In launching the sexual war on the woman, the master would not only assert his sovereignty over a critically important figure of the slave community, he would also be aiming a blow against the black man. The latter's instinct to protect his female relations and comrades (now stripped of its male supremacist implications) would be frustrated and violated to the extreme. Placing the white male's sexual barbarity in bold relief, Du Bois cries out in a rhetorical vein:

The retaliatory import of the rape for the black man would be entrapment in an untenable situation. Clearly the master hoped that once the black man was struck by his manifest inability to rescue his women from sexual assaults of the master, he would begin to experience deep-seated doubts about his ability to resist at all.