Sugar in the Blood (30 page)

The sexual exploitation of slave women was so omnipresent in Atlantic slavery that few visitors to the region failed to mention it in their reports. While many observers found the practice “disgraceful and iniquitous,” it was nonetheless evident from the earliest days of slavery. The historian Hilary Beckles notes that one of the major problems the enslaved black woman faced was “getting the slave master off her back in the day time and off her belly in the night time.” White men often had their first sexual experience with a woman of colour and continued to assume rights of access thereafter. Thus if a female slave tried to resist she was quite likely to be met with cruel beatings or other punishments. Unsurprisingly, some women chose simply to submit and used these relationships to further their own economic and social goals.

One of the most revealing accounts of a planter’s sexual relationships with his slaves was provided by the plantation manager Thomas Thistlewood, who as well as recording the obscene punishments he inflicted on his slaves in his diary also kept a detailed account, written in an elaborate code, of his sex life on the various Jamaican plantations where he worked. With the exception of a handful of sexual encounters with white prostitutes, all of his partners were women who worked for him. Whether they were young or old, sick or well, none was safe from his sexual marauding. He molested women on the way to the fields, in the kitchens, in their cabins as they rested. Not even venereal disease hindered his sexual exploits. These assaults began almost as soon as he arrived on the island. In the first few weeks he recorded sex with Franke under a cotton tree and with Mirtilla in a slave cabin and in a field by the riverside. After that the attacks would carry on almost unbroken for the rest of his time in Jamaica.

For Thistlewood, sex with his slaves, whether consensual or not, was one of the perks of plantation life. He made no effort to hide any of these encounters. And why should he? These women were in his complete power—as were any witnesses—and there was no one to whom they could complain or from whom they could obtain redress. In an average year he had sex 108 times with around fourteen different partners. The only evidence of any guilt was the trinkets or coins he would sometimes stuff into his victims’ hands after the deed was done. By his own account, after a total of thirty-seven years on the island, Thistlewood had had intercourse on 3,852 occasions.

Thistlewood also pandered his slaves to his friends. When visitors came to the estate they only had to indicate an interest in a particular female and she would be summarily dispatched to their room. Even those visitors who expressed no such inclination would often be sent some poor girl anyway. They were a demonstration of his hospitality, like copious food and ever-flowing rum. Alongside his philandering, Thistlewood also had more committed relationships, in particular one with Phibbah, who worked as housekeeper at the first plantation where he was employed. Their relationship lasted almost all the years he spent in Jamaica. They quarrelled and made up like any ordinary couple; presents were exchanged, and this enterprising woman would even lend him money she had earned through her sideline of buying
and selling produce. Phibbah bore him a son in 1760, whom Thistlewood referred to as “Mulatto John.”

The sheer number of Thistlewood’s sexual encounters is shocking, but perhaps not untypical of that time and place. One Barbadian planter, for example, famously claimed to have fathered seventy-four illegitimate children with his slaves. Another Martinican planter boasted that at least a third of the children on his plantation were “the product of his loins.” Again, Thistlewood’s own behaviour did not come to light because his neighbours regarded his sexual conduct as scandalous, but because he was meticulous enough to record it. In this context, Robert Cooper’s network of liaisons was unremarkable. He probably assumed these relationships were his right as a planter, and he would not have been overburdened with embarrassment or remorse.

The effect on the slave community of such casual sexual marauding would have been immense. Beyond the damage done to the women themselves, their mothers, fathers, lovers and brothers were forced to continue serving their abusers, powerless to protect or avenge them. In this way, the planters’ sexual liberty intimidated slaves across the plantation. Robert Cooper’s ability to take any woman on the estate was a mark of his complete control over his slaves’ bodies and lives. And random rapacious attacks were part of the regime of violence that maintained order at plantations like Burkes and across the wider slave system.

There was often something of a pattern to these liaisons. Those in the early days of a planter’s marriage tended to be more short-lived and tentative than many of those which followed. The first transgressions often felt dangerous and were carried out anxiously and furtively, lest their wives or friends object. But as time passed, men’s confidence grew. They realized that their wives would not—or more significantly could not—leave them. They also knew that their neighbours and contemporaries were often doing exactly the same thing, that their whole community would turn a blind eye—often with a nudge and a wink. The law was also on their side. For most of the duration of slavery in Barbados a man could not be accused of “raping” his slave because the slave was property and therefore had no legal rights. As time went on and “concubinage” (the keeping of black mistresses) became an integral
part of island life, the legislature wisely decided to stay out of it. As the Jamaican planter Edward Long remarked: “
He who should presume to show any displeasure against such a thing as simple fornication, would for his pains be accounted a simple blockhead; since not one in twenty can be persuaded, that there is either sin or shame in cohabiting with his slave.” (The taboos against white women having sex with black men grew stronger as white men’s permission to take black women increased.) Realizing that they could get away with these affairs, Robert Cooper and his contemporaries became emboldened and increasingly little effort was invested in being discreet.

In 1809, for example, Robert Cooper began a relationship with Susannah, more commonly known as Sukey Ann, a young slave girl who was about his son’s age. Born around 1795, Susannah was listed as a “stock-keeper” and was fourteen years old when she was baptized. This probably marked the start of her relationship with Robert Cooper, since some planters baptized their slave mistresses before becoming too embroiled with them. Their reasoning showed up some of the nonsensical attitudes of slave society. Men like Robert Cooper were quite happy to seduce a girl barely out of childhood but were not willing to have sex with a heathen. The relationship with Sukey Ann would continue for a number of years, and would produce four children: Sarah Jane, John Richard, Thomas Edmund and Thomas Stephen.

The memoirs of the American slave Harriet Jacobs have left us a moving portrait of the vulnerability of young female slaves like Sukey Ann:

The reasons that slave girls resisted were myriad:

The enslaved woman was in a particularly vulnerable situation if she was pretty: “
That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.”

Jacobs’s own trials began when she entered her fifteenth year, “a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl,” when her master, Dr. Flint, forty years her senior, “began to whisper foul words” in her ear. “Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.” His pursuit of her was relentless. Sometimes he was gentle and charming; at other times “stormy” and “terrifying.” He reminded her constantly that she was his property; “that I must be subject to his will in all things.” His wife, meanwhile, was so overcome with jealousy that she refused to protect her young charge.

Dr. Flint was unusual in that he wanted Jacobs to submit to him without rape, but nonetheless she was appalled. She trembled at the sound of his footsteps and shuddered when she saw him approaching. She was acutely aware of her legal vulnerability: “there is no shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all these are inflicted by fiends who bear the shape of men.” The psychological impact of the situation was profound: “I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but it is hard to tell how much I suffered in the presence of these wrongs, nor how I am still pained in retrospect.” Jacobs only escaped her owner’s sexual attentions when she took up with a younger and equally powerful white man.

Even after the woman had succumbed, her vulnerability continued. The planter Hugh Perry Keane, whose estate was situated on the island of St. Vincent, kept a diary that detailed his tumultuous five-year affair with his “
Sable Venus” Betty Keane. It was serious enough for him to purchase her from his father in 1791, and Keane Senior was happy to facilitate their liaison since he had his own “Betty” on the plantation. Though he was a single man, Keane was too conventional to make their relationship public as some planters did. So to the outside world he was a handsome single dandy pursuing eligible Vincentian ladies, while in private he was in a ménage with his black slave. It was a passionate relationship. His diary begins with the words: “I wrote a few lines to
Miss B.” And when she was away from the plantation for a few weeks he could not sleep there and pined for her horribly. Their union was marked by much drama, jealous rages on both sides, and unfounded accusations of infidelity; on numerous occasions she pouted and he locked her out of the house.

Their liaison did not mean that Betty escaped the whip; she was beaten when Keane felt jealous or frustrated. But her role was more than just sexual: she was his lover, confidante and helpmate. In lieu of a lawful spouse, she was his “plantation wife,” delegating work to the domestic staff, ordering essentials for the great house and generally overseeing his household. She also provided a vital link between him and his slaves; her greater understanding of plantation dynamics meant that she was able to give him invaluable advice on managing his charges. Their relationship eventually ended after a night out in the capital when Betty was raped by a sailor while Keane was collapsed in a drunken stupor. Instead of sympathizing, he blamed her for the incident and labelled her “a Jezebel.” Despite her pleas, Keane refused to take her back and Betty was left to fend for herself. Their respective fates reflect the injustice of history: Hugh Keane went on to marry an English heiress, while Betty disappeared into obscurity. Despite visiting his plantations in St. Vincent many times subsequently, he never mentioned her again.

Whether Robert Cooper and Sukey Ann’s relationship was as tumultuous as Keane and Betty’s is unknown, but it is evident that he had some affection for the woman, or at least some sense of obligation to her, otherwise he would not have manumitted her and her children. What this relationship meant for Sukey Ann remains a mystery. Can we even speak of commitment or choice or desire in such an unequal situation? Was it the living hell of repeated rape? Or was she willing to trade sex for the opportunity to gain the greater comfort and security that black concubines enjoyed amidst the dangers and the deprivations of plantation life? Is it possible, despite the profoundly unequal, even tragic circumstances of their relationship, that these two could have somehow loved each other? One imagines that several of these things might simultaneously have been true. The historian Barbara Bush stresses that not all interracial relationships were predicated on violence and abuse. Indeed, she argues that it is possible that the sensational accounts of sexual exploitation of women of colour by white
men have overshadowed the fact that there may have been healthy and loving sexual relationships between these two groups during slavery. Contemporary accounts support this, as John Waller wrote: “
I have observed many instances of [white men] being perfectly captivated by their mulatto mistresses, who thus obtain their freedom and that of their children from the master who cohabits with them.”

The most significant of Robert Cooper’s illicit relationships was with a mulatto woman called Mary Anne. She was his wife Mary Ashby’s body servant: the person who woke her in the morning, drew her bath, cared for her clothes and styled her hair. The relationship between a mistress and a personal servant was one of the most intimate on the plantation. The work took most of the hours of Mary Anne’s day, and it is possible that she often slept in Mary Ashby’s bedroom. The two women would have spent more time in each other’s company than Mary Ashby would have spent with her husband. She was the person most knowledgeable about Mary Ashby’s habits and who learned how to anticipate and meet her needs. The role of body servant was so important that Mary Anne was a significant figure on the plantation; but Mary Anne was a mulatto and a slave and Mary Ashby was white and free, so an unspoken but yawning gulf existed between them.

When Robert Cooper became interested in Mary Anne, it was a scenario worthy of the most steamy plantation novel. Unquestionably the close daily intimacy they shared—even with his wife present—made it easier and more likely for them to develop a relationship. But this proximity must also have lent their clandestine relationship a very tense and claustrophobic quality. And since this particular plot turned on sexual rivalry and complex power struggles, the
ménage à trois
was no doubt the talk of Burkes. The principal players were locked into a complex power struggle that went way beyond mere jealousy. The central protagonist, Robert Cooper, had the luxury of being largely in control of the situation. We don’t know if he enjoyed the illicit nature of this liaison, or whether he felt guilty or worried. After all, even in slave society, conducting an affair with someone so close to one’s wife was potentially disastrous.