Abstract
Marcus Rediker, in The Slave Ship: A Human History, focuses less on the technical elements of the Triangle Trade and more fully on the relationships onboard slave ships—the formation and deformation of identity. The success of a voyage depended on the captain and crew, who could not have “‘dainty fingers nor dainty noses,’” because “theirs was a filthy business in almost every conceivable sense.”1 The captain, who had to control both his crew and slaves, oversaw the relationship between the sailors and slaves, which included intense brutality, which, for women, involved beating and rape.
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Notes
Rediker, Marcus. (2007). The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York: Viking Press, p. 6.
Ibid, p. 31.
White, Deborah Gray. (1985). Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 64ff.
Ibid, pp. 19–20.
Ibid, p. 241.
Ibid, p. 242.
Ibid, p. 305.
Ibid, p. 306.
Ibid, p. 307.
Townes, Emilie. (2006). Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, pp. 7, 21.
See, for example, Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge University Press, 2008). Glymph argues that the plantation household was a workplace, hence, it was not fully “private,” but was a space in which practices of domination were exercised daily (2). White women, then, “wielded the power of slave ownership. They owned slaves and managed households in which they held the power of life and death … far from being victims of the slave system, they dominated slaves” (4). They beat, scarred, and otherwise dominated the women who worked in their households.
Douglass, Frederick. (1986). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. New York: Penguin Books, p. 92.
Ibid.
See, for example, Melton McLaurin’s historical parallel to Toni Morrison’s (1991). Beloved: Celia, A Slave. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Celia murdered the master who victimized her.
Lefalle-Collins, Lizzetta. (2000) “Slavery in the USA.” In Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories Oxfordshire, UK: Taylor and Francis, Ltd., pp. 449–450.
Hartman, Saidiya V. (1997). Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Jasmine Nichole Cobb, “Directed by Himself: Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave,” American Literary History 26:2 (Summer 2014). Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy-remote.galib.uga.edu/journals/american_literary_history/v026/26.2.cobb.html?#b6 Accessed December 29, 2014.
Johnson Reagon, Bernice. “American Diaspora Women: The Making of Cultural Workers,” Feminist Studies 12:1 (Spring 1986), p. 89.
Washington, Margaret. (2009). Sojourner Truth’s America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, p. 224.
Painter, Nell Irvin. (1997). Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. and “Sojourner Truth in Life and Memory: Writing the Biography of An American Exotic,” Gender and History 2:1 (Spring 1990): pp. 1–16.
Mabee, Carleton. (1995). Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend. New York: New York University Press.
Painter, Nell Irvin. “Representing Truth: Sojourner Truth’s Knowing and Becoming Known,” The Journal of American History (81)2 (September 1994), pp. 461–492; 465.
Ibid, p. 465.
Truth, Sojourner. “Ain’t I A Woman,” Sojourner Truth Institute, http://www.sojourn-ertruth.org/Library/Speeches/AintIAWoman.htm. Accessed March 5, 2015. Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (New York: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 92.
Beardslee III, John W. (1986). “Orthodoxy and Piety: Two Styles of Faith in the Colonial Period.” In James W. Van Hoeven (ed.) World and Word: Reformed Theology in America, p. 14. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
The most comprehensive work on the Matthias movement is Paul E. Johnson and Sean Wilentz, The Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). Isabella was involved with Matthias through an employer, Elijah Pearson. When Pearson died a suspicious death, Isabella was accused, as the only black person in the movement, of her murder. With her characteristic sense of justice, Isabella went to the press. Gilbert G. Vale recorded her version of the story in Fanaticism: Its Source and Influence. Illustrated by the Simple Narrative of Isabella, in the Case of Matthias (available at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/vale/vale.html).
Cooper, Valerie C. (2011). Word Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans. Carter G. Woodson Institute Series. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press.
Ibid, p. 96.
Ibid, p. 466.
DuBois, W. E. B. (1996). The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Penguin Books.
Rodman, Margaret C. “Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality. American Anthropologist 94:3 (September 1992), p. 647.
Moore, R. Laurence. (1998). “Insiders and Outsiders in American Historical Narrative and American History.” In Jon Butler and Harry S. Stout, Religion in American History: A Reader, p. 200. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ibid, p. 201.
Ibid, p. 207.
Ibid, p. 214.
Ibid, p. 215.
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© 2015 Ibigbolade S. Aderibigbe and Carolyn M. Jones Medine
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Medine, C.M.J. (2015). Women in the African Diaspora: Sojourner Truth, Hybrid Identity, and Multi-vocal Text. In: Aderibigbe, I.S., Medine, C.M.J. (eds) Contemporary Perspectives on Religions in Africa and the African Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137498052_12
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