Enslaved Black Women & Resistance
(Listen here for the soundtrack to this essay)
The black body in what has become the United States of America has been a vessel to be tortured, mutilated, rejected, and resurrected by its own gumption. According to the tradition of United States law and social practice, ones humanity is neither innate nor reserved for every person occupying space in this country. This violence is meted out based on arbitrary and faulty but potent reasoning that inspires even citizens excluded from positions of political power to enforce violent practices within their own sphere of influence. This reasoning effectively constructed power structures and conceptualized a white self defined by its contrast to the ‘other’. As a result, the United States since inception has been a wholly hostile environment to exist in for the black body. For the beings carrying the souls of enslaved black women, the introduction and subsequent subjugation under American chattel slavery was tragic notwithstanding the moments of solace they captured throughout their lives. The gendered resistance of black women under enslavement is necessary to study to fully have an understanding of the unique experience of women at the intersections of racism, sexism, and classism. Increased scholarship seeks to counter the passive narrative of enslaved West African descended women archetypes that fail to accurately exemplify their incredibly nuanced positioning and resistance efforts in America.
Gendered resistance explores the unique ways that enslaved black women used a variety of means to undermine the institution of slavery. Resistance does not necessarily only cover the attempted revolt at Harper’s Ferry by John Brown and his co-conspirators; mutilation of tools, feigned illness, and temporary abscondment are also covered under the scope of forms of resistance. Oftentimes, enslaved women had different links to the plantation that kept them from severing ties with their prison. Responsibilities to their own children, even less protection from sexual predators on the treacherous journey to freedom, the vulnerability in escaping with youngsters among a range of other reasons kept the population of escaped women lower than that of escaped men.
In general, enslaved people of African descent used a multitude of rebellious tactics to resist the constant and oppressive force of the institution of slavery. Those enslaved rebelled through insurrection on the plantation and on more expansive scales such as the 1811 rebellion that moved from St. John Parish to New Orleans. Resistance also occurred through ‘self-stealing’ or running away from plantations as well as the ordinary acts of defiance that slowed down the productivity of the workforce. Disruption also looked like halting the entire plantation operations by killing the slave master like in the case of an enslaved woman who was killed by the state in 1755 in Charleston, South Carolina for poisoning her master. Consistent and sometimes indirect resistance directly conflicts with the pervasive archetype of the happy, docile slave oftentimes portrayed by media of the period and even into collected contemporary literature.
The risk of resistance was always high and the reward did not always come to fruition as intended, if at all. Resistance provided temporary escape and occasionally permanent liberation from bondage. Oftentimes the ordinary acts of resistance did not have a major immediate impact on the daily yield of the plantation, but they did serve as an exercise in pursuit of mental catharsis. Conducting acts of defiance also meant accepting the near certainty of trauma being meted out with discovery. Enslaved people also had to be hyper vigilant in who earned their trust as betrayal was always an ever-present ambient thought. Anyone could take advantage of their status for their own gain and with little to no evidence have the enslaved individual meet a violent demise.
The reward of resistance could be from euphoric deliverance into the Promised Land to mental consolation that one had some agency over their existence. To be free was the ultimate goal like the roaming Maroons in Jamaica and the successful Haitian revolutionaries. Life free of real and imagined chains wasn’t the only marker of success. When one absconded temporarily from enslavement and forced their owner to expend resources to ascertain their whereabouts and recapture them, they lost time and productivity. Disrupting the chattel slavery ecosystem in any way contributed to the ultimate disintegration of American slavery. Those expansive and local acts of resistance over the course of three centuries would erode the foundation that held them steadfastly in the grips of enslavement. It also wears away the argument that enslaved black people did not have agency in their liberation and that the moral righteousness of the United States government is what freed them.
cover image: “black america again” album artwork (2012) lorna simpson