slave life--love and courtship

Last week in my African American history class, we emphasized stereotypes and racism, particularly by walking through Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Then Friday, the student leaders showed the first part of the film "Ethnic Notions." It was totally ahistorical--we're in the 1820s and their showing a film largely about cartoons in the 1940s (as well as Jim Crow paraphernalia), but they were so excited I let them do it. Monday, I cut the other way and detailed some of slave life--the agency in the oppression. There's this wonderful primary source I've stumbled upon of "Descriptions of Love and Courtship in Slavery" originally published in We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century edited by Dorothy Sterling. I found the excerpts here.



In the excerpts, the enslaved people fear of getting sold away from families (i.e. oppression is not ignored), but there is also the butterflies and first looks of courtship among young people. I think students can dehumanize slaves in their minds if we emphasize too much their oppression. Today and Friday we are reading Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. Unlike Olaudah Equiano, which students read as someone not criticizing slavery (well at least I became a Christian was a favorite line of theirs), despite my emphasis that he was an abolitionist, Jacobs clearly delineates slavery's wrongs. I had them read Equiano and asked about his role in the slave trade because I also wanted the students to understand that slavery was pervasive during that era and that's why Equiano participated in the slave trade before he became an abolitionist. I think instead they saw him as a privileged slave who should have fought against slavery from the very beginning. It is so easy to judge the past. I don't want them not to think slavery is a horrible institution, but I would like them to think about how it was a pervasive system and that we also live in systems of oppression today that we may or may not be fighting against. The interesting thing with Jacobs is that she minimizes the sexual exploitation she suffered. She writes as if it were just persistent sexual harassment ("just"), when if you read behind the lines, it seems pretty clear that it was also rape. My colleague Novian Whitsitt is beginning a project on slave narratives and he pointed this out to me.

Anyway, back to love and courtship. I love this one:

My first husband--nice man; den he sold off to Florida--neber hear from him 'gain. Den I sold up here. Massa want me to breed; so he say 'Violet you must take some nigger here.'
       Den I say, "No, Massa, I can't take any here.' Well den, Missis, he go down to Virginia, and he bring up two niggers--and Missis say, 'One ob dem's for you Violet;' but I say, 'No, Missis, I can't take one ob dem, 'cause I don't lub 'em.' By-and-by, Massa he buy tree more, and den Missis say, 'Now, Violet, ones dem is for you.' I say 'I do' no--maybe I can't lub one dem neider;' but she say 'You must hab one ob dese.' Well, so Sam and I we lib along two year--he watchin my ways and I watchin his ways. At last, one night, we was standin' by de wood-pile togeder, and de moon bery shine, and I do' no how 'twas, Missis, he answer me, he want a wife, but he didn't know where he get one. I say, 'Plenty girls in G.' He say, 'Yes--but maybe I shan't find any I like so well as you.' Den I saw maybe he wouldn't like my ways 'cause I'se an ole woman, and I hab four children; and anybody marry must be jest kind to dem children as dey was to me, else I couldn't lub him. Well, so we went on from one ting to anoder, till at last we say we'd take one anoder, and so we've libed togeder eber since--and I's had four children by him--and he never slip away from me nor I from him.

I find this passage fascinating for the resistance that the author shows to her owners' attempt to coerce her into giving birth. I also like sense of slowly accumulating love that appears between the couple.

intellectual origins of racism

Monday in my African American History class, I discussed the question "did racism cause slavery, or did slavery cause racism?" One answer to the question appears in Major Problems in African-American History, vol 1, which reprints a 1962 essay by Winthrop Jordan. In this article, Jordan argues two things: one, that the answer to this question is necessarily a reflection of contemporary racial norms and two, that the answer is neither, they both arose in tandem and in response to each other.

For the first answer, he notes that in the late 19th and early 20th century, when this question first arose, historians assumed that whites innately (and rightly) believed blacks were inferior. This reflected the political reality of the time. By the 1920s, this idea had begun to loosen and it was proposed that slavery might have come first, before prejudice. By 1950, Oscar and Mary Handlin suggested there was a period of same-status for whites and blacks, till 1660, by which time whites were becoming more free and blacks less free. This meant that “if whites and Negroes could share the same status of half freedom for forty years in the seventeenth century, why could they not share full freedom in the twentieth?”

Jordan argues that the evidence is not strong for this perception. That from 1620 to 1640, there is simply not enough evidence to confirm or deny that white and black servants experienced the same treatment. Then from 1640 to 1660, there are several instances of blacks being assumed to have a life time of service. For instance, in a list giving the prices of different white and black servants, the white servants have a span of time after their name, while the black servants have just "Negro."Jordan's conclusion, and his own stab at the contemporary implications, was

But what if one were to regard both slavery and prejudice as species of a general debasement of the Negro? Both many have been equally cause and effect, constantly reacting upon each other, dynamically joining hands to hustle the Negro down the road to complete degradation. Mutual causation is, of course, a highly useful concept for describing social situations in the modern world. Indeed it has been widely applied in only slightly altered fashion to the current racial situation: Racial prejudice and the Negro’s lowly position are widely accepted as constantly reinforcing each other.”

This essay was written, I am sure, during the preparation of Jordan's famous White over Black. I read that book a long time ago and learned a lot at the time, particularly about the role sexuality played in creating white prejudice.

As I am not a scholar of slavery, this makes me ask how White over Black is perceived today. There's an interesting article in History and Theory from 2005 about the way the book has stood up over time. Laurence Shore writes

However, the book's grasp of the fundamental historical issues requiring explanation has received recent affirmation from influential scholarly and political quarters.A dispassionate review of the literature leading up to and following White over Black's publication indicates that Jordan's emphasis on the causal contribution of racist attitudes to the rise of African slavery in British North America was on target. Moreover, Jordan's appreciation that academic historians should write for non-professionals is now widely held inside the academy. The historical accuracy and cogency of expression of Jordan's perspective on race and slavery make White over Black worth re-examining.

Does anyone out there have a contemporary sense of the answer to the question "Did slavery cause racism or did racism cause slavery?" The textbook I'm using also takes a middle path. Darlene Clark Hine, et al argue

This suggests that before the 1670s the English in the Chesapeake did not draw a strict line between white freedom and black slavery. Yet the ruling elite had since the early 1600s treated black servants differently from white servants. Over the decades, the region's British population gradually came to assume that persons of African descent were inalterably [sic] alien. This sentiment was the foundation of the establishment of chattel slavery, in which slaves were legally private property on a level with livestock, as the proper condition for Africans and those of African descent.