Abstract
Enslaved women thrust into the bowels of domestic suffering were also faced with the stench of sexual assault. In her autobiography, former enslaved woman Harriet A. Jacobs (a.k.a. Linda Brent) identified the thin line between domestic and sexual violence. She, along with other enslaved women spent their lives negotiating the atrocities of American slavery—a slavocracy latent with vile acts of brutal physical assaults and sexual tyranny. Jacobs wrote that “the degradation, the wrongs, the vices that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe…Only by experience,” Jacobs continued, “can anyone realize how deep, and dark and foul is that pit of abominations.”1
“Granny,” I said, “did your master harm you in another way?”…she leaned over and answered… “see dat girl…dot’s my chile by him [master]…I didn’t want him, but I couldn’t do nothin’.”
—enslaved woman
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Notes
Harriet A. Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, in The Civitas Anthology of African American Slave Narratives, William L. Andrews and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. (Washington D.C.: Civitas/Counterpoint, 1999), pp. 490
William Bosman, A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea (London: Frank Cass, 1967 [1705]), pp. 208–211.
Deborah Gray White, Ain’t I Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), p. 29.
Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 187.
Alexander Falconbridge, An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London: J. Philips, 1788).
M.M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 19.
For more insight on the “Mammy” figure see: Michelle Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (New York: Dial Press, 1979)
Riggins R. Earl, Jr., Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self & Community in the Slave Mind (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1994), pp. 113
Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”, in The Black Scholar, 3 (December 1971), p. 13.
George M. Stroud, Stroud’s Slave Laws: A Sketch of the Laws Relating to Slavery in the Several States of the United States of America (Baltimore: Imprint Editions, 2005), p. 33.
George Rawick, ed., The American Slave, a Composite Autobiography, 19 vols. (Connecticut: Greenwood, 1972), 18
Frederic Bancroft, Slave Trading in the Old South (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1931), p. 112.
B.A. Botkin, ed., Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945), p. 155.
Stanley M. Elkins, Slavery, A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 137–138.
Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom, David Freeman Hawke, ed. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), p. 163.
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© 2009 Renee K. Harrison
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Harrison, R.K. (2009). “Dat Man Grabbed Me an’ Strip Me Naked”: Enslaved Women and Sexual Violence. In: Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America. Black Religion/Womanist Thought/Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100664_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100664_5
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