Words of Fire (64 page)

The racial patriarchy of the white man enabled him to enact his culture's separation between the goodness, purity, innocence, and frailty of woman with the sinful, evil strength, and carnal knowledge of woman by having sex with white women, who came to embody the former, and black women, who came to embody the latter.
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The white man's division of the sexual
attributes of women based on race meant that he alone could claim to be sexually free: he was free to be sexually active within a society that upheld the chastity and modesty of white women as the “repositories of white civilization.”
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He was free to be irresponsible about the consequences of his sexual behavior with black women within a culture that placed a great value on the family as a sacred institution protecting women, their progeny, and his property. He was free to use violence to eliminate his competition with black men for black or white women, thus breaking the customary allegiance among all patriarchs. He was also free to maintain his public hatred of racial mixing while privately expressing his desire for black women's bodies. Ultimately, white men were politically empowered to dominate all women and all black men and women; this was their sexual freedom.

From the beginning, the founding fathers assumed the patriarchal right to regulate and define the sexual behavior of their servants and slaves according to a fusion of Protestantism, English Common Law, and personal whim. During the early colonial period the distinctions between indentured servant and slave were blurred and relative: most workers, black and white, male and female, worked without direct payment or without control over their labor. These laborers shared enough common experiences to jointly attack their masters and to have sex with each other.
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The master's racial attitudes of antipathy toward black people and his fears of a unified antagonistic force of all workers, including Indian women and men, demanded that the category “white” be expanded to give political power and freedom to all white men (theoretically and potentially, if not at that actual historical time) and patriarchal protection and white privilege to all white women. Thus, during the later colonial period, black men and white women who had sex, married, and/or had children were punished and persecuted as American society denied them the right to choose each other as mates.
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The category “white” would also mean that the people designated “black” could be held in perpetual slavery.
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Therefore, laws were passed and practices instituted to regulate the sexual and social behavior of white and black, servants and slaves. The legal and actual distinction between slave and servant was widened with “slavery reflecting lifelong power relationships, while servitude became a more temporary relationship of service.”
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In other words, in spite of the common experiences of black and white workers in colonial America, indentured servants were whitened as slaves became black.

Though black people were less than five percent of the population in the later part of the seventeenth century, a 1662 Virginia statute stipulated that “all offspring follow the condition of the mother in the event of a white man getting a Negro with child.”
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A 1664 statute prohibited all unions
between the races.
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In 1665, the first English slave code in New York provided that slavery was for life.
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Colonial law and custom reflected the parameters that would continue to govern American sexual behavior: regardless of who impregnated black women, any offspring would be slave. As Hofstadter puts it, this “guaranteed in a society where interracial sex usually involved the access of white men to black women, that without other provisions to the contrary, the mulatto population would be slave.”
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Well before the institution of slavery was firmly established in the antebellum South during the nineteenth century, these laws and others prohibiting black political participation, ownership of land, and the right to carry arms
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were aimed at creating a black population in perpetual servitude.

Slavery and slaveholders dominated American political and economic life for about two hundred years. As Carl Degler describes it:

Degler's phrase “ability to accumulate surplus for investment” tends to obscure all traces of the inhumanity of slavery: black women's bodies were a primary means of accumulating the surplus: “My mother was young—just fifteen or sixteen years old. She had fourteen chillen and you know that meant a lots of wealth.”
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New slave owners with one or two slaves attempting to “construct an initial labor force” and establish an economic base in order to realize profits broke up slave communities or African clans by obtaining individual slaves through purchase, gift, or marriage. The fecundity of black women was key to the slave owner's goal. Gutman documents that as one planter said, “An owner's labor force doubled through natural increase every 15 years.”
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A slave, looking back, agrees:

“Natural increase” meant that the black woman was encouraged and sometimes forced to have sex frequently in order to have babies whether by black men or white men, in stable or unstable relationships.

But as early as 1639, black women resisted forced sex:

But though it was beyond
her
concept of enslavement, it was not beyond her master's, for every part of the black woman was used by him. To him she was a fragmented commodity whose feelings and choices were rarely considered: her head and her heart were separated from her back and her hands and divided from her womb and vagina. Her back and muscle were pressed into field labor where she was forced to work with men and work like men. Her hands were demanded to nurse and nurture the white man and his family as domestic servant whether she was technically enslaved or legally free. Her vagina, used for his sexual pleasure, was the gateway to the womb, which was his place of capital investment—the capital investment being the sex act, and the resulting child the accumulated surplus, worth money on the slave market.

The totalitarian system of slavery extended itself into the very place that was inviolable and sacred to both African and European societies—the sanctity of the woman's body and motherhood within the institution of marriage. Although all women were slaves under patriarchy, the particular enslavement of black women was also an attack on all black people. All sexual intercourse between a white man and a black woman irrespective of her conscious consent became rape, because the social arrangement assumed the black woman to be without any human right to control her own body.
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And the body could not be separated from its color.

Racial oppression tends to flow from the external to the internal: from political institutions, social structures, the economic system, and military conquest, into the psyche and consciousness and culture of the oppressed and the oppressor. In contrast, sexual oppression tends to direct itself directly to the internal, the feeling and emotional center, the private and intimate self, existing within the external context of power and social control. Black women fused both racial and sexual oppression in their beings and movements in both black and white worlds.

Black women moved through the white man's world: through his space, his land, his fields, his streets, and his woodpiles.

In the white man's world, black women would have a place: “I know at least fifty places in my small town were white men are positively raising two families—a white family in the ‘Big House' in front, and a colored family in a ‘Little House' in the backyard.”
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In the white man's world, black women were separated from black men: “When I left the camp my wife had had two children by some one of the white bosses, and she was living in fairly good shape in a little house off to herself.”
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They became the teachers of sex to white boys. “Testimony seems to be quite widespread to the fact that many if not most southern boys begin their sexual experiences with Negro girls.”
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White men tortured and punished black women who refused them: For fending off the advances of an overseer on a Virginia plantation, Minnie Falkes's mother was suspended from a barn rafter and beaten with a horsewhip “nekkid” til blood run down her back to her heels.
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Madison Jefferson adds:

The black woman worked in the white man's home, both before and after formal emancipation. She knew her master/lover as a man; she was intimate with his humanity; she fed him and she slept with him; she ministered to his needs.
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One slave remarked, ”Now mind you all of the colored women didn't have to have white men, some did it because they wanted to and some were forced. They had a horror of going to Mississippi and they would do anything to keep from it.“
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Black women and white women were sisters under the oppression of white men in whose houses they both lived as servants. In the antebellum South, Mary Chestnut wrote, “There is no slave after all like a wife.”
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A white woman married to the planter/patriarch endured, suffered, and submitted to him in all things. White women, though viewed as pure and delicate ladies by Southern myth, had to serve their husband/masters as did the female servants and slaves; managing the household, entertaining the guests, overseeing the feeding and clothing of both slaves and relatives.
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Both white and black women were physically weakened and often died from birthing too many of the master's children. White men often had several wives in succession because many died in childbirth. While white wives visited relatives for long periods of time to have space between pregnancies,
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exercising a much-needed control over childbearing, black women all too often filled the gap for both recreational and procreational sex. Ann Firor Scott writes of one South Carolinian who thought, “The
availability of slave women for sex avoided the horrors of prostitution. He pointed out that men could satisfy their sexual needs while increasing their slave property.”
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To be a white woman in the antebellum South meant accepting the double standard; brothers, fathers, and mates could enjoy sex with her sisters in bondage, black women. White women however, were prevented from enjoying sex because they were viewed as “pure women incapable of erotic feeling.”
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Many southern white women privately disliked the double standard and the horrors of the sexual life it implied: “Under slavery we lived surrounded by prostitutes like patriarchs of old, our men live in one house with their wives and concubines.”
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An ex-slave woman agreed:

Yet for all the private outrage of white women at the “injustice and shame” to all womanhood of the sexual activities of white men, black women stood alone without the support of their sisters. Most white women sadistically and viciously punished the black women and her children for the transgressions of their white men. One study states:

White women used the social relationship of supervisor of black women's domestic labor to act out their racial superiority, their emotional frustrations, and their sexual jealousies. Black women slaves and domestic servants were useful buffers between white men and white women, pulling them together, resolving their conflicts, maintaining continuity and structure for the white family whose physical and emotional needs they fulfilled.
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