Gender, Slavery and the Making of New World Identities

Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233 Tiffany Ruby Patterson, ‘Gender, Slavery and the Making of New World Identities’ Gender & History, Vol.11 No.2 July 1999, pp. 373–378. THEMATIC REVIEWS Gender, Slavery and the Making of New World Identities TIFFANY RUBY PATTERSON David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine (eds), More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1996), pp. ix + 341, $39.95 and $18.95. ISBN 0 253 33017 3 (hb) and 0 253 21043 7 (pb). Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1997), pp. x + 264, $49.95 and $16.95. ISBN 0 8223 1983 7 (hb) and 0 8223 1992 6 (pb). Scholarly work and debates on slavery and slave societies have flourished over the last four decades, with debates about slave statistics, slave lives, and slave societies reaching a fever pitch. Gendering that scholarship began slowly, however, and until the 1980s remained limited to a few scattered articles rather than full-length studies. As articles appeared with increasing frequency, full-length studies gradually followed: Deborah Gray White’s Ar’nt I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), the first book-length study of women slaves in the United States; Claire Robertson and Martin Klein, Women and Slavery in Africa (1983), a representative collection of the existing scholarship in this area; Hilary Beckles, Afro-Caribbean Women and Resistance to Slavery in Barbados (1988) and Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (1989); Marietta Morrisey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (1989), and Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (1990). These works have been very important in building upon the literature in academic journals. With the intense interest in the African Diaspora and the Atlantic world, however, studies or collections are needed that provide a framework for comparative understanding. Studies are needed also that grapple with the concepts of gender, race and slavery in the development of national histories and national identities. In both regards the two books reviewed here add significantly to the scholarship in slave studies. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 374 Gender and History In More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine have gathered a varied group of essays that reflect the broader interests in the field and the areas that need considerable work. Of the fifteen essays, one focuses on Africa, six on the United States, two on Brazil, and six on the Caribbean region. The collection is divided into three broad themes: ‘Africa and the Americas’, ‘Life and Labor’ and ‘Slavery, Resistance and Freedom’. The insightful essay by Claire Robertson, ‘Africa into the Americas?: Slavery and Women, the Family, and the Gender Division of Labor’, argues that African slavery was characterised by its variation and complexity, from moderate forms of bondage to harsh plantation slavery. Slaves were acquired in a variety of ways as prisoners of war, kidnapping, and through judicial processes. The malleability of slavery in Africa was one of its most important characteristics, allowing for more manumission even under harsh chattel slave systems. Unlike New World slavery, African slavery was characterised more by ‘lineage, kin-based or absorptionist slavery, which was used primarily to increase labor but had as an essential feature the eventual assimilation of the slave into society’ (p. 6). Inheriting slave status was therefore uncommon. Since most slaves in Africa were women, concubinage and marriage opened spaces for assimilation with their children automatically manumitted. Robertson, however, does not suggest that slavery in Africa was benign, only that it was diverse. It was, like the Americas, a system of forced labour, created classes of slaves and slaveholders, and as Claude Meillassoux has noted of Sahelian slavery, ‘the [slaveholding] aristocracy must be a repressive class, armed, turned as much against the [free] people as against the slave class’ (p. 7). Robertson provides a balanced view of African slavery, discarding ‘romantic notions of egalitarian precolonial Africa, even while recognizing that colonialism created or vastly exacerbated existing economic inequalities in African societies’ (p. 12). One of the most contentious debates about slave families, particularly in the United States, is the degree to which the alleged matriarchal structure of slave families had its roots in Africa rather than in the New World slave systems and whether the results prepared Africans for slavery. Robertson carefully unravels the debate, demonstrating that while matrilinearity, and female economic independence have given women more autonomy and political power than their European counterparts, this autonomy did not translate into gendered structures where women exercised dominance over the society’s economic and ideological structure. Matrifocality, on the other hand, was not uncommon in Africa. Robertson states that ‘a matrifocal family is one in which the mother plays a substantial role in providing subsistence and making decisions’ (p. 12). Most pre-colonial West African families were matrifocal, particularly if they were polygamous. But the degree to which this system translated into the power of women can only be determined by a careful analysis of class and gender in specific societies. Polygamy was class-related and associated with wealth. Further, decisions over resources was a gendered matter and patriarchal ideology was as operative in African matrilineal societies as elsewhere. The remaining essays in the collection cover a wide range over time and space. Despite the variability of slave societies, some general characteristics emerge. Slave women were valued for both their productive and reproductive abilities but the labour needs generally outweighed concerns over childbirth and health. Work was arduous and women suffered numerous health problems. Jobs were not allocated on the basis of gender and the majority of women were required to perform © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999. Gender, Slavery and the Making of New World Identities 375 the same heavy tasks as men as well as domestic tasks reserved for women. Essays by Richard Steckel, Cheryll Ann Cody and Wilma King highlight the toll that this double burden took on the health of women and children and consequently families. For example, women were not guaranteed a lighter work load during pregnancy and their nutritional needs were rarely met. Nearly half of all children born did not survive the first year and their growth was much slower than expected. Childhood was dreadful and families faced considerable obstacles to stable relationships. These findings are supported generally by the work of Bernard Moitt on the French Caribbean and Barbara Bush and Hilary Beckles on the British Caribbean. Slave women resisted this double burden as women. As mothers and key figures in their families, they reasoned that confrontational methods were not always the best way to secure their own and their children’s wellbeing. However, when needed, many did not shirk from confrontation and these women were admired for their courage by members of the slave communities. As Brenda Stevenson noted in her article, women ‘were forthright in their appreciation of self-reliant, self-determined survivalists who had the wherewithal to protect themselves and theirs, confrontationally if need be’ (p. 171). Robert Olwell in his essay on market women in Charleston demonstrates the complex ways in which women contested slavery by seizing opportunities for economic independence and eventually freedom. Essays by David Barry Gaspar on the British Caribbean, Mary Karash and Robert W. Slenes on Brazil, provide points of comparison. The lives of free women are explored by David Geggus, Susan Socolow, and Virginia L. Gould, adding comparative texture to the portraits of slave women’s lives. This collection provides a rich discussion of the complexities of slave women’s lives, demonstrating not only the hardship and brutality of the system but the ingenuity and courage of these women under harsh systems of exploitation. It also points the way to new research agendas. More careful work needs to be done on women’s everyday experiences incorporating the differences in colonialisms, time, and space. Comparisons between new world slave systems and slave systems in other parts of the world would yield a richer understanding of gendered experiences. While the editors note gaps in this collection – no selections on the Spanish Caribbean, for example – it is an invaluable addition to the scholarship on the gendered aspects of slavery. Maggie Montesinos Sale’s The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity sets itself a different task. Rather than illuminate the lived experiences of slaves, in this instance slave men, she seeks to unravel the vexed relationship between race, gender, slavery, and the formation of national identity in the decades preceding the Civil War. Her focus is on slave revolts as reported in the popular press and represented in literary treatments of revolts on the high seas. Four revolts, two real and two imagined, frame the core chapters of the study. The real rebellions aboard the Amistad (1839) and the Creole (1841) are examined in relationship to two fictional revolts, Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno (1855) and Frederick Douglass’s only fictional work, The Heroic Slave (1853). In five chapters, Sale uses literary theory to examine pamphlets, newspaper accounts, and other printed sources to demonstrate how antebellum America viewed and understood the slave revolts aboard the Amistad and the Creole. Sale then turns her discussion to fictional accounts. At the time of the real and fictional revolts, © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999. 376 Gender and History America was a troubled nation. Its struggles to create a narrative of itself as a nation rooted in liberty were distorted by the contradictions of slavery and free labour. Free African-American men and women pressed their rights to citizenship and demanded an accounting from the advocates of democracy. At the same time, the Saint Domingue Revolution and the domestic revolts of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner which it spawned hovered like a ghost over the new nation. More revolts in the hemisphere – 1831 in Jamaica, 1832 in British Guyana, and the bloody 1835 Male rebellion in Brazil – created a rebellious environment. Indeed, the fear and anxiety engendered by these revolts makes the outcome of the Amistad and the Creole revolts all the more fascinating. Unfortunately, Sale fails to link the shipboard uprisings to these earlier revolts and thereby provide a richer context for these events and how they shaped the construction of race, manhood, and identity. She does, however, provide important insight into questions of race, gender, and identity through her close reading of these popular texts and their reception by the public. Sale opens her study with an investigation of the construction of white manhood in the context of the American Revolution. She then moves to a discussion of the rhetorics of race and nation in the 1830s as contained in several journals and magazines and identifies several competing and often contradictory mythologies of national development. These discourses are drawn from publications edited by whites, such as the Democratic Review, the Southern Literary Messenger and Harper’s Magazine which asserted an Anglo-Saxon national identity that ‘discursively excludes members of differently coded communities from being “individuals” and by implication from participation in economic, cultural, and political structures’ (p. 37). Challenges to these racialist discourses were contained in publications by Northern free black people who rejected assertions of their inferiority and unfitness for membership in the republic by drawing upon discourses of national identity which took three forms: ‘appeals to the logic of racial regeneration, assertions of a common masculinity, or claims to the trope of revolutionary struggle’ (p. 47). These arguments were contained in such publications as Freedom’s Journal, the Weekly Advocate, and the Colored American. In this discussion, Sale establishes the context for the presentation and reception of the shipboard slave revolts by the public. When the Mendi slaves and their leader Cinque rebelled aboard the Amistad, travelling from Cuba to Long Island, America was in the opening stages of an abolitionist movement that would ultimately lead to war. The Amistad revolt would catapult this question of freedom and slavery into the courts, leading to a decision unprecedented in US legal history. The decision by Justice Story established the Mendians as free men since they were Africans in origin and could not be held as slaves in territories where the slave trade had been abolished. As free men they could avail themselves of the notion of ‘righteous revolt against an unjust oppressor’ (p. 117). But the decision also upheld the legality of property in persons in the presence of positive law and therefore, Sale argues, ‘confirmed the way in which the Constitution limited authorised subject positions to “all [born free] men”’ (p. 118). The outcome of the controversy and court case surrounding the revolt is set against the complicated reception of these revolts as contained in popular texts. Nuanced readings of these texts reveal how the revolt was constructed by the various communities examined in the first two chapters. Conflicting accounts of the rebels quickly appeared. The New Orleans Picayune sketched a grisly portrait © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999. Gender, Slavery and the Making of New World Identities 377 of piracy and murder. The moderate abolitionists drew contrasting images describing the rebels as ‘quiet, kind and orderly … [they are] intelligent and docile Africans’, a portrait at once racial and respectful (p. 85). Friends of the rebels had to find a way to position them as the legitimate inheritors of the trope of revolutionary struggle. Accomplishing this task required constructing ‘an interpretive frame that would position the rebels as part of the community of “all men” rather than as part of the enslaved population’ (p. 106). Remaking Cinque as a patriot extraordinaire and his followers as a people not related to the masses of slaves but a people with their own linguistic, political, and cultural specificity was a strategy that proved successful. Only in this way could they be worthy claimants to the trope of revolutionary struggle, a right never allowed African people even today. The revolt aboard the Creole (1841) in New Orleans offers an interesting counterpoint to the events surrounding the Amistad affair. The rebels aboard the Creole were from the United States and therefore posed a conceptual problem for their supporters. Writers in publications by free blacks initially attempted to connect the Creole rebels with the Mendians. However, only the most radical abolitionists offered a genealogy for the rebels as revolutionary heroes, a strategy quickly abandoned. To acknowledge that these rebels had the right to revolt collided with the racialist thinking of both white abolitionists and slaveholders. This right could never be accorded to black people no matter how just their cause. Further, their supporters were unable to portray them as citizens or as a separate people worthy of the right of rebellion. The right to rebel by American-born Africans therefore was not established by the Amistad affair as the Creole incident clearly indicates. This is one of the most important contributions of Sale’s study. The rebels aboard the Creole survived because their fate rested with the British rather than the Americans, and the British had ended slavery in 1834. Their ability to utilise the friction between the British and Americans ultimately saved their lives. Shifting her focus to the imaginative world of writers, Sale investigates Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno, a story based on the revolts aboard the Amistad and the Tyral in 1800, and Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave, based on the revolt aboard the Creole. The outcomes of these revolts differ and connect to the debate raging over slavery and abolition. Melville’s Benito Cereno allows no possibility of freedom and the rebels are executed. More importantly, the silencing of Babo, the leader of the rebellion, exposes the fear driving the repression of slave rebellion, ‘the unspoken, suppressed, and unacknowledged fear that “they” may be as intelligent as – or more so than – “we”’ (p. 170). The rebels are not permitted a forum to present their oppositional agenda or a framework to interpret their works and acts which is sensitive to their position. Douglass has a different objective in The Heroic Slave. Focusing on the hero Madison Washington, he not only envisions political abolition, that is the legal end to slavery, but imagines a world where African-American men are equal to the patriots of the US Revolution. At the time of Douglass’s publication, slave rebellion could not be represented let alone imagined by the American public as patriotic or democratic. To claim the right of black men to be patriots made sense in Douglass’s present. For these men, the right to a national identity was the right to freedom and equality. Although Sale’s use of literary and cultural theories to excavate these texts frames a skilful discussion of race, masculinity, and national identity, her work suffers from a limited historical context. As a consequence she fails to reconceptualise © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999. 378 Gender and History American history as completely as she might have. For example, fuller awareness of the Saint Domingue revolution and the subsequent revolts in the Americas and of the discussion that these generated would have deepened her understanding of the debates in the 1830s and 1840. In short, a diasporic framework would have accomplished the revision of American history that Sale sought to achieve. Further, if she had thought more deeply about the question of gender in the writing of women, and not simply accepted a rigid understanding of masculine and feminist discourses, she would have come much closer to reconceptualising American history. Instead, by relegating her discussion of women to the afterword, she misses an opportunity to further tease out the nuances of these gendered discourses. On the other hand, Sale’s skilful analysis demonstrates how historical events became a canvas upon which debates about racial and national identity took place. Her work adds to our conceptual understanding of how race is refracted through gender and how categories such as citizenship qualify the deployment of gender. Maggie Sale’s keen analytical eye and well-written prose makes The Slumbering Volcano an important addition to the emerging work on the Americas and an absolute must read for anyone interested in questions of gender, race, and identity. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999.