Abstract
What was an enslaved African woman to do with digested sugarplum poison and no immediate antidote? She internalized the mayhem. At times, it caused her to abandon her Africanness and adopt the trickster’s anti-African ideologies and Euro-American Christian dogma. She became a victim of anti-African circumstance. This chapter examines self-violence in the lives of enslaved women. Self-violence includes enslaved and free African peoples’ internalization of their oppressors’ preconceptions about their Africanness—preconceptions about such matters as their very humanity, place of origin, ethnicity, cultural traditions, philosophies, and traditional religions. Africanness refers to African peoples’ personhood and precolonial ways of life as well as those worldviews and practices they carried over from Africa to the Americas.
I was a sinner and I didn’t even know it… when I touched that mainland I fell into the arms of the Lord.
—Viola Peazant in Julie Dash’s, Daughters of the Dust
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Notes
Edwin R. Embree, Brown America: The Story of a New Race (New York: Viking Press, 1931).
Sylvester A. Johnson, The Myth of Ham in Nineteenth-Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), p. 24.
Rev. Orange Scott, An Appeal to the Methodist Episcopal Church (Boston: David H. Ela, Printer, 1839), p. 22.
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Dianne Stewart, “Christian Doctrines of Humanity and the African Experience of Evil and Suffering: Toward a Black Theological Anthropology”, in Ties That Bind: African American and Hispanic American/Latino Theology in Dialogue, Anthony B. Pinn and Benjamin Valentin, eds. (London: Continuum International, 2001), p. 172.
Rev. W. H. Robinson, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, or, Fifteen Years in Slavery, 3rd ed. (Eau Claire, Wisconsin: James H. Tifft, 1913), pp. 81–83.
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Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, The Norton Anthology African American Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), p. xxxii.
Carter G. Woodson makes this point clear in his analysis of internalized oppression in the lives of black peoples in America which resulted in “the mis-education of the Negro.” For more insight see: Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), pp. 17–25.
Jarena Lee, “A Female Preacher Among African Methodists”, in African American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, 2nd ed., Milton C. Sernett, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 165.
Delores S. Williams, “Straight Talk, Plain Talk: Womanist Words about Salvation in a Social Context”, in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation and Transformation, Emilie M. Townes, ed. (New York: Orbis Books, 1997), p. 99.
Emilie M. Townes, ed. Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspective on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1997), p. xi.
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© 2009 Renee K. Harrison
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Harrison, R.K. (2009). “Fix Me Jesus”: Enslaved Women and Self-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_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230100664_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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