Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
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The extent to which planters believed that young women they perceived as Ebo were more fecund than others determined specialized treatment. At Golden Grove estate, Ebo women were forced into unions with enslaved men. The property’s attorney, Simon Taylor, said that he intended “for every man to have his wife” (emphasis added). Thus, as soon as “the first good Eboe ship” docked, he promised to buy as many women as needed to “give each man a wife.”70 It is unknown how extensively Taylor paired Ebo women with men on Golden Grove. We do know, however, of at least one occasion in February 1794, when he carried out his matchmaking plans. The men were reportedly “pleased with the wives [he] sent them.”71 Reports from other properties suggest that at least a few planters paired newly purchased women with men already residing on the plantation. In 1805, Rowland Fearon, attorney for Lord Penrhyn’s properties, announced his plans to have the “New Negro Girls at Coates [estate] intermarried [with the] men at the Penn [Bullard].”72
Several Jamaican planters targeted Ebo in their matchmaking efforts (again bearing in mind the conundrums of this marker). Planters paired Ebo women with Coromantee men. Unlike planters and doctors like Taylor, Phillips, and Collins, who emphasized the reproductive promise of Ebo women as a criterion for specialized treatment, the Ebo women in one historian’s account were singled out because of their presumed disposition. Planters coupled Ebo women with Coromantees because they believed these ethnic groups had opposing temperaments that complemented one another. Ebo women supposedly had more domestic tendencies that would help tame the more unruly, unsettled Coromantee. In return, the more enterprising and mentally resilient Coromantee men would strengthen the suicidal tendencies in Ebo women.73
Planter emphasis on the ethnic origins of African captives they expected to form into intimate unions not only contrasted with the policies abolitionists promoted, reflecting planter determination of the course of reform. By denying enslaved people autonomy over their own sexual partnerships, such coerced unions were also met with resistance. The likelihood of enslaved people rebelling against the arbitrary sexual partnerships prompted Taylor to put a few contingency measures in place. He allocated additional provision grounds and housing spots for the women in the event that they opposed his plans.74 The lack of further mention of his efforts to control enslaved women’s intimate relations suggests that the people at Golden Grove refused to cooperate and forced Taylor to abandon the scheme as quickly as he proposed it. The fact that Taylor and other planters complained about enslaved women’s nocturnal wanderings suggests that the freedom enslaved people claimed over bodily pleasures made it difficult to impose sexual relationships upon them and impossible to police their intimate lives.75 Attorney Fearon attempted similar interventions at Lord Penrhyn’s properties, but he abandoned the schemes because of enslaved people’s resistance. He reported, “I found it a tiresome and arduous task and gave it up as a bad job.”76
Although forced unions victimized both enslaved men and women, the coupling of newly arrived captive women with men already living on the plantation altered the gendered balance of power. Already seasoned into plantation life, enslaved men had the advantage of familiarity with their environment and being less immediately traumatized from the experience of the Middle Passage. It is not coincidental that planters chose recent arrivals to force into sexual unions. Captive women’s weakened state and lack of familiarity with their new surroundings made them most vulnerable to the control and advances of their purchasers and arbitrarily selected husbands. Reports of enslaved men being pleased with their wives raise further difficult questions that are not easy to answer from these sources. To what extent were enslaved men collaborators in the subordination and the sexual abuse of enslaved women? At other times, black men exerted physical and sexual power over black women through rape and domestic violence. At the very least, these records suggest that placing women into men’s households positioned enslaved men as head of household and invoked Europatriarchal standards that granted household heads unrestricted sexual access to their dependents. The occupational hierarchy that privileged men in most status-bearing and leadership roles already promoted black patriarchal power over black women, even though enslaved men were also victims of their masters’ expectations and machinations.77
Although planter assumptions about the reproductive capacities and tendencies of Ebo made these young women more susceptible to interference in their intimate lives, all enslaved women were vulnerable to planters scrutinizing their sexuality. Planters, doctors, and government officials denigrated African captives as being licentious, and despite planter efforts to select the best women “who are fit for breeding,” their exertions yielded few positive results because of women’s so-called promiscuity. Such complaints of sexual impropriety, however, reflected women’s refusal to conform to the sexual mores prescribed by reformers. In 1789, the Jamaica Committee of Council reporting to the British House of Commons noted, “Births are not so frequent amongst Negro Slaves in this Island as among the Peasantry of Great Britain, and it is in great measure attributed to their manners and habits of life.…Both sexes [frequently engage in] licentious intercourse.” The report further explained that women patronized “Negro plays or Nocturnal Assemblies, in distant Parts, where they dance immoderately, drink to Excess, sleep on the damp Ground in open Air, and commit such Acts of Sensuality and Intemperance [that] bring on the most fatal distempers.”78 By emphasizing sexual habits, witnesses for the slaving interests shifted attention away from the strenuous labor regimes, cruel punishments, and neglect of enslaved people’s material needs that abolitionists focused on as the leading causes of population decline.
Planters and doctors echoed the council’s testimony and added that while the health of men and women suffered immensely from their nocturnal rendezvous, the consequences were far more injurious to female fertility than to male fertility. Fearon noted that “the women [were subject] to cold, obstructions, and other maladies [which are] the enemies to procreation.”79 Estate agent Thomas Barritt noted that such activities left the women “disordered and feeble,” minimizing their chances of bearing children.80 Enslaved women’s alleged promiscuity became an additional justification for planters to coerce them into intimate unions with arbitrarily chosen men on the plantations. Claiming authority over slaves’ bodies and sexuality, Fearon “did attempt to persuade all [the enslaved] people to intermarry and do away with the rambling at night.”81
Implicit within these writings is slaveholders’ ignorance of the sociocultural practices of enslaved people. Many Jamaican planters and colonial observers assumed that enslaved women’s late night activities were occasions for overindulgence of their sexual passions “with a multitude of men.” They believed these occasions involved the excessive consumption of alcohol, which they feared caused infertility in women. Plantation doctor William Wright asserted, “There are no causes on a well ordered estate that impede the natural increase of slave Negroes so much so as going to Negroe balls.…They [engage in] venery too early and often with a number of men. They [too easily accept] spirituous liquor and above all they conceal venereal complaints from White people.”82 Sharing Wright’s assessments, another estate doctor, Thomas Dancer, emphasized that “the unbound indulgences in venereal pleasures [are] a common cause of sterility” in women. “The parts are left in so morbid a state as to be unfit for impregnation,” he wrote. “The uterine and the vaginal vessels are distended, and a perpetual discharge, or flux albus is the consequence.”83
Enslaved people’s social habits had long been subject to scrutiny and misrepresentation by enslavers across New World slave societies. Several historians have stressed that enslavers constructed stereotypes and images like “Jezebel” in order to legitimize their sexual access to and exploitation of enslaved women and girls.84 Indeed, the enslaved remained subjected to these racist and sexist stereotypes during the abolitionist era.85 However, their so-called promiscuity not only justified enslavers’ sexual assault. Limitations on the sexual liberties of enslaved women were now legitimized under the veneer of promoting biological reproduction. Enslaved people were not subdued so easily, however. These misunderstood late night excursions proved nothing more than that enslaved people had their own views about their sexual practices and social habits and they found clandestine ways to express them. They insisted on pleasuring their bodies in ways of their choosing.86
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