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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery Author(s): Anthony S. Parent, Jr. and Susan Brown Wallace Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 3, No. 3, Special Issue: African American Culture and Sexuality (Jan., 1993), pp. 363-401 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3704013 . Accessed: 24/09/2013 11:00

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery

ANTHONY S. PARENT, JR.

Department of History Wake For est University

and

SUSAN BROWN WALLACE

Psychologist

Fairfax County, Virginia, Public School District

Students of history continue to ignore the simple fact that all individu? als are born by mothers; that everybody was once a child; that people and

peoples begin in their nurseries; and that society consists of individuals in the process of developing from children into parents. [Erik Erikson,

1959]1

Although children were present in substantial numbers dur?

ing late antebellum slavery, little scholarly attention has been paid to

them. Even less concern has been directed toward their development.2

Remarking upon slavery studies in 1986, Leslie Howard Owens points out that "children are often so closely connected with the behavior of

adults and parents that the historical record needs considerable matur-

ing." When childhood is discussed, children's lives are often seen as dis?

tinct from that of their parents and separate from the brutalities that

they suffered. When evidence is presented from the slave autobiogra-

phies and slave interviews, one is led to believe that adults conveyed

1Erik H. Erikson, ?CEgo Development and Historical Change: Identity and the Life

Cycle," Psychological Issues 1 (1959): 18. 2Slave children, fourteen years old and younger, were 45.5 percent ofthe slave popula?

tion, according to a sample based on the 1850 census (James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A

History of American Slaveholders [New York, 1982], p. 249). For discussions of children under slavery, see Willie Lee Rose, "Childhood in Bondage," in Slavery and Freedom, ed. William W. Freehling (New York, 1982), pp. 37-48; Paul D. Escott, Slavery Remembered: A Record ofTwentieth-Century Slave Narratives (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979), pp. 30-31, 34; John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, 2d ed. (New York, 1979), pp. 179-91; EugeneD. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), pp. 502-18.

[Journal ofthe History of Sexuality 1993, vol. 3, no. 3] ?1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 1043-4070/93/0303-0004$01.00

363

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364 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

little of their own suffering to their carefree children.3 For example, John Blassingame writes in a study on the slave community, based on

slave autobiographies and memoirs, that "black children played in pro? miscuous equality with white children. Together they roamed the plan- tation or went hunting, fishing, berry picking, or raiding watermelon

and potato patches. Indeed, at first, bondage weighed lightly on the

shoulders ofthe black child. "4 Owens suggests, on the other hand, that

slavery at its best was comprehended by the mothers, fathers, and chil?

dren as the "great compromiser."5 For this study we are defining childhood as that period under age

fifteen or occurring anytime an individual defines an experience as hap~

pening during childhood. Erik H. Erikson writes that childhood proper ends with the advent of puberty.6 The age of menarche of slave girls has

been approximated at age fifteen. Eugene D. Genovese believes that the

lives of boys changed dramatically at the age of twelve, when they (often

eagerly, because of its connotation of manhood) went behind the plow. Deborah Gray White writes that girls entered the workforce at the same

time as boys, between twelve and sixteen years old, joining them in the

"trash gangs," picking up stubble and weeds during the growing season

and picking cotton during the harvest. It was here in this three-

generational mix of pregnant women, nursing mothers, and elderly women, White speculates, that young girls emerging from an asexual

childhood learned about men, marriage, and sex. Like Blassingame, both White and Genovese find that children before age twelve were vir-

3Leslie Howard Owens, "The African in the Garden: Reflections about New World Slavery and Its Lifelines," in The State ofAfro-American History Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hines (Baton Rouge, LA, 1986), pp. 33-34.

4Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 183-84. For a similar conclusion drawn from an

analysis of the WPA interviews, see Genovese, p. 505. Deborah Gray White, Afn't I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York, 1985), pp. 92,98,184 n. 3. On the other hand Escott, working with twentieth-century interviews, suggests that "the happy child of plantation fable was far less common than southern whites supposed. Mas? ters and mistresses frequently misunderstood the feelings and actions of slave children" (p. 31).

5Owens, pp. 33-34. 6Erik H. Erikson, "The Human Life Cycle," in Erik H. Erikson, A Way of Looking at

Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980, ed. Stephen Schlein (New York, 1987), p. 605; James Trussell and Richard Steckel, "The Age of Slaves at Menarche and Their First Birth," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1978): 504; White, p. 94. Philippe Aries, on the other hand, has found that the appellation of "child" was indifferent to biological phe? nomenon but instead tied to dependency, such that a worker of twenty-five could still be a "boy" in sixteenth-century France, yet as soon as children were weaned they mingled with adults in everyday life. At the same time, the privileged classes were discovering childhood as a separate and distinct stage of development (Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick [New York, 1962], pp. 25-27).

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 365

tually segregated from their parents because ofthe work regimen on the

antebellum southern plantation. Paul Escott finds that at age fifteen

boys and girls left childhood activities and chores and took on adult

work tasks.7

Twentieth-century interviews of African Americans who had experi- enced slavery as children open a window into the developmental lives of

slave children.8 For this study we are using the more than one hundred

narratives or interviews of former slaves collected in 1929 and 1930 by

Ophelia Settle Egypt, a member ofthe research staff ofthe Social Science

Institute at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The Fisk University interviewers were themselves African Americans. Escott in his analysis of twentieth-century slave narratives has observed that in these inter?

views "there was more honesty in the all-black interviews and less obei-

sance to social rituals [of contemporary racial etiquette]. . . . This ritual

was wholly lacking in the Fisk collections."9 In the narratives, the for?

mer slaves spoke of their experiences as children. We have focused upon those events that are primarily sexual or that have impact upon the indi-

viduaPs development of sexual identity. These narratives give evidence

of how the slaves developed their sense of sexual identity and show how

they viewed sexuality and issues ofa sexual nature. The Fisk University editors ofthe published narratives noted that these narratives document

"how the slaves met their basic needs of sex, hunger and rest, within the

narrow confines ofthe system. They represent essentially the memories

of childhood experiences, and provide, in a measure, a personal history of the social world as recreated and dramatized by these slaves in the

course ofthe telling. Taken as a whole these autobiographies constitute

a fabric of individual memories, which sheds interesting light on the

mentality ofthe slave. "10 Since we are concerned not only with the accu-

racy of the events but also with how the perception of the events influ?

enced the individual, we see the narratives as a rich source of knowledge about the concerns of the slave children.

7Genovese, p. 505; White, pp. 94-95; Escott, pp. 16-17, 31-32.

8Escott, pp. 3-16; George P. Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making ofthe Black

Community (Westport, CT, 1972), pp. xv-xxi. Blassingame, thoroughly critical ofthe for? mer slave narratives, nevertheless concedes that "given the average age of the informants when they were freed, their stories contain a great deal of information about the childhood

experiences of slaves" (John W. Blassingame, ed., Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies [Baton Rouge, LA, 1977], pp. iii-iv, xlvii.

9Escott, pp. 9-10.

10Ophelia Settle Egypt, Unwritten History of Slavery: Autobiographic Account of Negro Fx-Slaves (Nashville, TN, 1941), reprinted in The American Slave: A Composite Autobiog? raphy, vol. 18, ed. George P. Rawick (Westport, CT, 1972), p. iii. All further citations to

Egypt's work (in the Rawick volume) will be given in parentheses in the text.

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366 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

The narratives were prompted by a series of questions that the infor-

mants were asked to consider. However, each former slave brought to

the encounter not only his own personal memory ofthe event, but also

the effect that time and experience had upon the individual. In many cases, the events had been repressed until the interviewer spoke of them.

In one case, a former slave told the interviewers that he thought it was

against the race to speak about slavery. In other cases, many events may have been embellished in their retelling. In all cases, the narratives are a

valuable recollection of the individuals' lives as children under slavery, which one former female slave born in 1855 anticipated in saying, "I

don't know anything [about slavery] 'cept what happened when I was a

child" (p. 276).u

Although these memories may have been affected by the years after

slavery, the experiences point to issues that concerned these individuals

during childhood. Roy Shafer has written:

Each account of the past is a reconstruction that is controlled

by a narrative strategy. The narrative strategy dictates how one is

to select, from a plenitude of possible details, those that may be

reorganized into another narrative which is both followable and

expresses the desired point of view ofthe past. Accordingly, this

reconstruction, like its narrative predecessor, is always subject to

change. For whenever new explanatory aims are set and new

questions raised, new slants on the past will be developed and

new evidence concerning the events of the past will become

available. Change of this sort typifies historical narratives of every kind.12

We began with many questions about how slave children viewed their

circumstances. It is important to note that in some cases, there were few

if any direct references to our questions. We were concerned with the

number and quality of references to sexual issues. We wanted to know

how much knowledge slave children had about sexual functions and

events. What did slave children know about breeding? How did they see the relationship between their owners, their parents, and themselves?

What effect did sale of family members have? What opportunities were

present for children to develop a sense of identity? Were there common

11 Our use of oral interviews here should not be construed to mean that we favor this type of documentation to the exclusion of others. Written autobiographies and memoirs, contemporary interviews, plantation records, traveler's accounts, and folklore also shed light on childhood and slavery. We are using all the above types of evidence in our history of childhood under slavery, which is in progress.

12Roy Schafer, The Analytic Attitude (New York, 1983), p. 193.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 367

themes, wishes, and desires evident in the slave narratives? Were sexual

fantasies present? Did children fantasize ideal situations when they were

faced with conflict? What role did violence play in the sexual identities of slave children?

Twentieth-century psychoanalytic theory helps us to understand no? tions of authority and dependence in identity development. Sigmund Freud and others believed that this development was influenced by sex? ual knowledge, thoughts, and conditioning. Freud was the first psycho? logical theorist to focus on the developmental aspects of personality and on the importance of childhood experiences in its formation. In doing so, he developed stages of psychosexual development and stressed the

importance of childhood sexuality. Freud believed that the unconscious held the key to personality and that many problems stern from unre? solved conflicts at a previous stage of psychosexual development. Erik

Erikson, while not abandoning Freud's concept of development or the role ofthe unconscious, did not dwell upon the importance of uncon? scious sexual forces. He developed instead a theory that focused upon the psychosocial stages of development, and on the development of ego identity and one's sense of self. Both theorists stressed the importance of

relationships with parents and primary caregivers in developing a sense of self. Erikson believed that as a result of the individual's interaction with others, his personality developed through a series of predictable life crises. One of these crises occurs at the stage of what he termed "identity development versus role confusion," which occurs around the time of adolescence. Before adolescence, the first cultural problems of identity occur when the individual attempts to negotiate through five epigenetic sequential stages: "trust versus mistrust"; "autonomy versus shame and

doubt"; "initiative versus guilt"; "industry versus inferiority"; and

"identity versus role confusion." Each stage must be mastered, for the social problems are fraught with danger for the individual. Erikson be? lieved that how an individual felt about himself influenced his interac? tions with others and determined how he developed from that stage on; Erikson used his theories in writing psychohistories of Mohandas

Gandhi, Martin Luther, and others.13

13A1 though psychoanalytic theory is Eurocentric in origins and was developed after slavery, Erikson used it to analyze other cultures. It serves as a heuristic tool to analyze slave children, who, like any other children, seem to go through epigenetic stages. See Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2d ed. (New York, 1963), pp. 65, 247-74. See also Sigmund Freud, "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), in vol. 7 of The Stan? dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London, 1963), pp. 125-245.

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368 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

What did the slave children know about sexual functions? Surprisingly, we learn from their testimony, they knew very little. Their parents, per?

haps in an effort to shield them from slavery's most invasive feature?

sexual exploitation?or in an effort, however difficult, to protect their

innocence, revealed little to their children about sexual functions or

procreation.14 One woman remembered that "When [menstruation]

happened, mother didn't tell us. I didn't know what had happened to

me. I went running to the branch and washed myself. I come on up the

road just naked; done been to the branch washing. It never did hurt me,

though" (p. 137). Most ofthe former slave women made no reference

to menstruation at all. Slave children sleeping in trundle beds knew

nothing that went on at night. A former slave to Dr. Gale remembered in Tennessee that "children never knew anything went on at night; all of

their play was in the day" (p. 15). Another said, "We had a little trundle

bed, and when we was put in it we didn't see no more till the next morn?

ing, and we had better keep quiet, too. We never did see daylight after

we was put in that bed until the next morning. Their [parents'] beds was

high enough to roll their [children's beds] under their's. They had [a]

hemp rope across their bed to keep from falling in on us" (p. 293).15 Al?

though the children were not consciously aware of events during child?

hood, the concerns with the "goings-on in the night" suggested that sexual concerns for these children were unconscious but nonetheless in?

fluencing their identities.

Although reared on farms, apparently privy to the sexual behavior of farm animals, slave children knew remarkably little about where babies came from. When queried by children, parents told them that either the doctor or the midwife brought babies. Unsatisfied with this response, children eavesdropped, hid under houses during childbirth, and looked in hollow logs and in parsley patches for babies. "They wouldn't tell me

nothing about babies. I heard them say one day?somebody said, cDon't tell Anne, [anything] but the doctor brings these babies.' I heard her talking to one of her daughters who had a baby. They wouldn't tell

14Escott finds this pattern pervasive in the slave narratives (Escott, pp. 52-53). See also Genovese, pp. 462-63; White, pp. 96,105. Gutman finds this pattern of withholding sex? ual knowledge to be evidence of sociosexual choice made in child-rearing by African American parents (Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedotn, 1750- 1925 [New York, 1976], pp. 82-83).

15In these interviews, not one ofthe former slaves mentioned seeing parents show affec? tion. Genovese gives one example and suggests that the children did see affection dis- played between husband and wife within the quarter. One heard his mother singing to her husband, "Sleepy creature, sleepy creature / There's something to do 'sides sleeping" (Genovese, p. 463).

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 369

me 'cause I wouldn't know no better than to blab it out; but I did not

tell this" (p. 187). A woman who was a child on Dr. Gale's plantation

agreed: "No, they didn't tell you a thing. I was a great big girl twelve or

thirteen years old, I reckon, and a girl two or three years older than that

and we'd be going 'round to the parsley bed looking for babies; and

looking in hollow logs. It's a wonder a snake hadn't bitten us. The

woman that would wait on my mother would come back and tell us

here's her baby; and that was all we knew. We thought she brought it be?

cause it was hers. I was twenty years old when my first baby came, and I

didn't know nothing then. I didn't know how long I had to carry my

baby. We never saw nothing when we were children" (p. 10). "They used to tell us that Aunt Sarah brought babies," recollected another

woman, "and I didn't know no better. It was a long time after the Civil

War 'fore I knowed where babies come from" (p. 295). Another former

slave girl recalled that "one day I asked my mother where babies come

from; she said the doctor brought it. One day I crawled up under the

house when a girl was fixing to have a baby; I heard her holler and after a

while I heard the baby crying. I asked my mother why the girl hollered if

the doctor brought the baby; she told me to get out of there or she

would kill me" (p. 138). Most ofthe former slaves who spoke of their childhood under slavery

agreed that their parents felt they did not need to know much about sex?

ual matters. This lack of knowledge was probably present in much ofthe

nonslave population as well. Interestingly, psychoanalytic theory would

suggest that by attempting to suppress sexual knowledge, conflicts and

crises were more likely to occur.

Slave children were ignorant, the informants believed, because their

parents did not trust them to keep secret the goings-on in the slave quar?

ters, not only with regard to the intimacy of sexual relations but also to

the clandestine thefts of hogs or chickens or the harboring of fugitives.

Elderly ex-slaves recollecting their ignorance not only lamented their

lack of knowledge but also commented upon the carnal knowledge of

the then contemporary youth. One woman remembered that "whenever

white women had babies they would make us stay out. I never did know

then where the babies would come from. First thing I would know the

baby would start to holler. We never seed nothing. People was very par? ticular in them days. They wouldn't let children know anything like they do now. The children now know everything" (p. 303). Another female

informant said, "Children then wasn't like they is now. Little girls know

more now than I did after I got grown. I work all one day and a half in a

hollow stump trying to find me a baby. When the doctor come around

with the saddlebags I told him to bring me a baby. I never knowed where

they come from. They know now where they come from. I hear these lit-

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370 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

tie girls talking about their beaus now. They know more than I know"

(p. 156). Should children be given information about the facts of sexual life?

In a 1907 letter to a colleague, Freud wrote about this question, noting a letter written by a child to her aunt, regarding where the aunt got her

babies. "Explanations about the specific circumstances of human sexual?

ity and some understanding of its social significance should be provided before the child is eleven years old."16 Freud believed that the fantasy stories that adults told children about their sexuality actually increased

their desire to know, rather than reducing it. Infantile theories about the

nature of marriage or sexuality were often not retained in the individu-

al's conscious memory. Freud believed, however, that they were mani-

fest in childish games, and later the wish to be married (or sexual) could

manifest itself in a phobia or other form of infantile expression.17 Less

than the question of where babies came from, the child concerned him?

self with the nature of marriage and of being married. This resulted, ac?

cording to Freud, from the child's observations of his parents and his

own sexual impulses, which were invested with pleasurable feeling.18 Freud also emphasized the importance of how the child behaved when

he finally received the correct sexual information.19 He noted that in

some children sexual repression had gone so far that they did not hear

any information. This repression could result from the message the

child had received that such information was dirty or negative. Erikson,

likewise, saw the withholding of information from the child in a nega? tive way, as interfering with the sense of ego development. His stage of

"identity development" began at around age twelve and was concerned

with the individual's ability to control his destiny. Consciousness of

adult sexual roles began to emerge at this time.

Although the former slaves said that they knew little about sexual

functions and procreation, it is evident that many of the slave children

nevertheless had concepts of courtship and of marriage. (In the psycho?

analytic sense, this is related to concern about sexuality and sex role.)

They had rules about who was available to whom and looked down on

slaves who did not follow these rules.20 The Fisk University interviewers

16Sigmund Freud, "The Sexual Enlightenment of Children," in Sigmund Freud: Col? lected Papers, ed. Ernest Jones, 5 vols. (New York, 1959), 2:43.

17Sigmund Freud, "On the Sexual Theories of Children," in ibid., 1:72. 18Ibid., p. 69. 19Ibid., p. 74. 20Beth Bailey has defined courtship broadly, encompassing "a wide variety of condi?

tions, intentions, and actions, for men and women woo each other in many ways, not all of which lead to marriage." Bailey also looks at the convention of courtship as the system of rules and understandings that provide a context, both culturally constructed and histori-

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 371

asked the former slaves: "Did they have many love affairs on the planta? tion? How did they court then?" Although the responses varied, the for?

mer slaves were quick to point out that they were more restrained in

their behavior than contemporary youth. "They just laffed and talked.

Didn't let the boys get around the gals like they do now. He sat over

there and you sat over here and do your courting. I never said cNo,'

honey" (p. 252). One woman, fifteen years old when slavery ended, said:

"We would just sit and talk with each other. I told him once I didn't

love him, I hated him, and then I told him again that I loved him so

much I just loved to see him walk" (p. 275). A former slave from Henry

County, Tennessee, said, "Boys wasn't like these now. We didn't pay no

'tention to people courtin'" (p. 293). "They courted then just like they do now. Only they wasn't fast like they are now. I never in all my born

days went out at night by myself and stayed out like these young folks do

now. When I went out I always had company" (p. 136). "They would let

us have company, but they couldn't stay no longer than ten o'clock" (p.

140). The following man, who had been enslaved in Christian County,

Kentucky, was the only informant to hint of casual sexual liaisons in the

Fisk University interviews. "Did you court the girls?" "Nope, I would

just laugh at them sometime." "How did you court the girls?" "Me, I

didn't court them. I didn't court them a'tall. All of them loved me; I

didn't court. You see, they didn't do like they might do now. They would call one another cHon,' and I would say cSweet.' And they would

say, 'Let's go home' and there would be something going on like a quilt-

ing, and I would go and take a gal home. They didn't do like they do

now" (pp. 145-46).21

cally specific, for concrete acts and individual experience. Although Bailey's work is con? cerned with middle-class white America, she does note the change in courtship before 1930 when the lower class, prompted by pressure to escape from cramped and crowded

housing and the opportunity that hard cash afforded in the new city living, introduced

"dating" (Beth L. Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America [Baltimore, 1988], pp. 6, 19). Blassingame has found courtship within the quar? ters to be "a highly formalized ritual involving a series of questions to determine one's

availability as a sexual partner." The courtship ritual of "riddles, poetic boasting, sexual

innuendos, figurative speech, circumlocution," initiated by the man but controlled by the woman in her ability to say no, was taught to the young by the old (Blassingame, Slave

Community, pp. 158-60). In addition, Genovese has found signs, charms, love potions, and improvised songs (pp. 469-71). The courtship rituals described by Blassingame and Genovese appear to reflect the actual experience of adults rather than the conventions of

courtship learned by slave children. 21This is the only response that suggests casual sexual liaisons. Herbert Gutman be-

lieves that adolescent girls involved themselves in casual sexual liaisons shortly after menarche at about age sixteen until the birth ofthe first child at about age eighteen. On the

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372 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

The mores of the community and parental control played a role in

who courted and when they began. Seventeen for boys and twenty-one for girls were not uncommon ages that these former slaves associated

with courting. Courting was then a supervised activity on the girl's plan- tation.22 "Well, they courted nicer than they do now," remembered one

woman. "They would come and see the girl they liked, and talked to

them at night after the work was done; and sometimes they would ask

them to marry; and sometimes they wouldn't. The white folks married

you then" (p. 204). Another woman recalled that her mother blocked

her courting. "No'm," she responded, "not when I was with her. When

we left there I was eleven years old [a year after slavery ended] and I was

not old enough to have a big time, and after we got big enough to have a

big time mother wouldn't let us go nowhere 'thout an old woman was

with us. I didn't have no good time till I married, and I married when I

was fourteen years and six months old. I was going to have a good time

anyway" (p. 280). Her youthful marriage seems to be an exception, for

"girls didn't marry so fast in those days," said one informant (p. 226). One girl who began courting at fourteen courted for seven years, believ-

ing that she had to turn twenty-one before she married, when her beau

"stealed her from mother," who had said, "I will never give all the gal I

have to a black nigger like you" (pp. 195-96). Note the negative racial

image associated with the marriage and the separation from the mother.

Boys, too, understood that mothers and community pressure delayed courtship for them. "We didn't court much in them days. A boy had to be near 'bout grown. The fust girl I went with I was nearly eighteen years old. When you got ready to marry all you had to do was for the girl to ask her mother and you had to get permission from the master and that was just about all to it. . . . If a boy went with a girl and said things that he shouldn't he could get a whipping for that. If you fooled a girl up and

other hand, the evidence presented by Trussell and Steckel suggests greater abstention from sexual activity. They suggest the age of first birth to be twenty-one, although they es- timate the age of menarche to be earlier, at fourteen and a half. The slaves interviewed by the Fisk University group are more in line with Trussell and Steckel. At the same time, the "most important" informants about female adolescent sexual behavior used by Gutman were two former male slaves. Gutman's discussion of sexual abstention of southern urban women in their twenties during the 1880s and his theory ofthe persistence of slave-held values into freedom appear to support greater sexual abstention during slavery (Gutman, pp. 63, 559 n. 15, 636 n. 13; Trussell and Steckel, p. 504). For a discussion ofthe litera? ture, see Robert W. Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York, 1989), pp. 180-84.

22White notes that "the slow pace of courtship dictated by anxious mothers" is an ex? ample of African American culture, denying the owners' desire for early reproduction (pp. 97, 98, 104-5).

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 373

got her with an armful you had to take care of her" (pp. 306-7). "I

wasn't big enough to court; I had to slip. I knowed the road she'd come, and I could slip off and meet her sometimes, but we had to dodge the

old folks 'cause they would whip me sho'. I'd walk a little piece with her, but I didn't know what to say. Young folks then wasn't like they are

now. ... I would just ask her (girl) what was the news, and I thought I

was doing big courting then; I would brag to the boys about it" (p.

260). An ex-slave from Christian County, Kentucky, vividly remem?

bered that "one time I seen a girl have her hand up in the collar ofa boy, and she take a small switch off a tree?a black gum tree?and give that

boy a whipping. He wasn't no account. He had asked for her company and she granted it. He was too young. They [females] weren't allowed to

have company before they was 21 years old, and for a boy when he was

just about 17 years old he was just about the right age to be considered a

man" (p. 146). Yet here as elsewhere children recalled that the owners' control and

plantation discipline interfered with courting.23 "I'd go down to my sis-

ter's house and do my courting down there. I could go down there and

stay till nine o'clock. He'd [master] make 'em marry who he wanted 'em

to marry. You couldn't marry who you wanted to" (p. 273). "The mas?

ter would do all the courting for you, yes sir he saw to that, he, he, he.

Once married [you] would stay at one offthe] parent's homes" (p. 222). Permission was not forthcoming for slaves to date free Negroes. One ex-

slave remembered that "it wasn't but one family of free niggers up here.

White people didn't recognize them, and they didn't 'low niggers to go around them. If they knowed they went around them they would cut

their backs off nearly. The men woulda noticed the slave girls if the

white folks woulda let them. Then they wouldn't let the girls go with a

free Negro" (p. 133). In another instance, a free man, a barber who

showed deep emotional commitment despite the personal cost, gave himself to his sweetheart's master to marry her. It made a lasting impres- sion upon the informant's young mind: "That love is an awful thing, I

tell you. I don't know if I would give my freedom away to marry any-

body" (p. 296). Former slave children remembered the violence associated with

courtship and marital visitation. Such images created a sense of anxiety about the development of adult sexual roles. The cultural trait of

exogamy retained from West Africa encouraged romances across

23White suggests that an owner's permission for visitation in the hopes of early child? birth and reproduction of the labor force was "an insidious kind of breeding," which eroded the parental and community desires for slower-paced courtship (p. 98).

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374 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

plantations.24 Boys or young men had to risk paddy rollers on the road

unless they had permission from their owners to visit. Without a pass, a

slave was at risk ofa beating by the paddy rollers, "whose business it was

to see that niggers would not rove around at night without the master's

knowing about it" (p. 32). One woman, fifteen years old when slavery ended, said: "You had to court right there on the place 'cause they had

padder rollers, and if you went out without a pass they would whip you"

(p. 275). One man recalled the story ofa slave named Brown who "had a

wife at my place, and he came every night to see her, so he came that

night and he didn't get back as early as he [master] thought he ought to.

Brown was a strong man and this white man that was the son of my mas?

ter attempted to whip him; so Brown threw him and ran to the woods.

He pursued and found him sleep on a sand bar out in the river; so he

killed him in his sleep and threw him in the river" (p. 54). The murder of

a strong man like Brown, who had the audacity to visit his wife nightly,

certainly gave pause to young boys projecting their own marital futures.

Visitation became more restricted during the war in an attempt to

stop men from running to Union lines. "During the War, the colored men that had wives at other places, they wouldn't let them go to visit them at all; they said they'd get to talking, and they threatened to shoot

any who tried to go" (p. 4). During the war the consequence ofa girl going out at night was fatal. "We had a girl on the place running out at all times of night. I knowed something bad was gonna follow her. You

could hear the soldiers after her, and you could hear her scream. They just killed her" (p. 137).25 Many frightening images were associated with courting among the former slave children.

As with most other areas of daily life, there was a range among the former slave children of activities where they could see their parents and other slaves in recreational roles and where they could meet possible mates. Parties and social events had to be granted by the owner (pp. 106-7). "Niggers didn't have time to do much courting in them days. White folks would let them have suppers 'round Christmas time, then after that it was all over and no more gatherings till the next summer; then they would let them set out under the shade trees sometimes on

Sunday evening, and all like that" (pp. 132-33). Many ofthe parties were related to weddings. One ex-slave from Nashville recalled that

"they wouldn't marry 'less they could have a dance" (p. 260). Some-

24Gutman points to the contrasting traditions of exogamy of slaves and endogamy of slaveowners to prove persisting social memory and cultural choice in African American society (Gutman, pp. 87-93). See also Escott, pp. 50-52.

25See Gutman (pp. 386-87) on the rape of girls and women by Union soldiers during the war.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 375

times the slaves would have parties after the white people had finished

theirs. "Jimmie Baxter's was a place that we could go and have a good

time," recalled one of Dr. Gale's former slaves. "There, the white folks

would have a party and when they finished eating, they would set the

things out on the table for the colored to eat" (p. 9). Usually, around the

Christmas holidays, slaves had some time to have social gatherings. Some were able to sit outside in the summer and converse with other

slaves. This was unheard of on other plantations. The most common social events were corn-shuckings, quiltings, and

dances.26 Another event was a candy-pulling. One former slave, remem-

bering his childhood, noted that they had dances and parties, but they "would be sho' 'nuf parties," unlike the ones he witnessed as an adult (p.

222). Another former slave, fifteen years old when the war began, was a

corn general at a corn-shucking social, who would call out the songs. At

the corn-shucking men competed on two sides. The masters provided

whiskey and the paddy rollers did not bother the slaves. He recalled a

fight when a fence rail was torn down at a corn-shucking. "The ladies

would wait on us and give us cakes and pies and all kind of good things to eat. That was the only enjoyment we had, but we sure had a good time

then" (p. 106). Another former slave remembered hearing at a corn-

shucking, "Rock me Julie, rock me, hey, hey, I'm going way to leave

you" (p. 295).27 When asked whether there were dances on the plantation, the corn

general remembered that "when we wanted to have a dance, we had to

ask the master. They would have a fiddler, and we would tromp around

mighty" (p. 107). Another slave vividly recalled, "Lord, yes, they'd pick

banjoes, and have big dances. . . . Oh, they would have dances at a differ?

ent house every week, on Saturday nights. No'm, we wouldn't dress up so much; girls come in clean cotton dresses; we thought we was dressed

up enough. . . . [We] jest dance and skip and hop ourselves to death" (p.

215). Another woman, fifteen years old when slavery ended, remem?

bered that "sometimes way back there they had big dances and would

dance against each other with a glass of water on their head" (p. 195). Another woman added, "We had good times. ... I danced a pattillion.

Vernon, he played everything. They had a bass fiddle and a big fiddle, and a little boy played it, and he had on a ruffled shirt and a scissor or

hammer tail coat" (p. 251). This reference is important, not only for the

individual's memory ofthe dances, but because ofthe specific role that

26Blassingame, Slave Community, pp. 160-61.

27Blassingame has written that the songs at the parties were "lusty songs about courting and love, they were filled with metaphoric references to sexual intercourse" (ibid., p. 161).

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376 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

was designated to a slave child at the particular function. She noted his

special clothing and ability to play the bass fiddle.

The former slaves noted that Christian folks did not go to dances.

Some recounted that once they accepted Christianity, they no longer danced.28 "I was a wild thing when I was young. Why I was more on

dancing than my Ole Missy, and she taught me to dance, too." After this

former slave joined the church she stopped dancing and observed,

"Dancing was an injury to me, I see it now" (p. 25). Another slave noted

that the Christian folks would have suppers, but they wouldn't dance.

These Christian slave gatherings were viewed as more threatening by whites than the dances. "White people were very hard on colored for

being religious. They liked to see you fiddling and dancing all the time.

They were hard on them for preaching. . . . As for me, I went where I

wanted to go, but I had to have a pass. Some of them didn't get passes and they would get caught and be sent out to jail, beat up and made

come on back. They used to tell you sometimes that they would send

you down the river and they would send you to Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama or Louisiana" (p. 121). These former slaves were located

in the Nashville, Tennessee, area and believed that being sent further

south was worse than death. How confusing, though, to the slave child

to perceive that such an awful punishment could befall a slave for mak?

ing a moral choice about his religious life.

Slave children were called upon to entertain themselves and their

owners. "We would play them plays." "Sugar Tea," "Goosey," "Frog in

the Middle and Can't Get Out," and "The Americans Are Gaining the

Day" were mentioned. Slave children had little idea of who Americans

were at that time, although the 1850s was a period when American na?

tionalism and nativism were at a high point. "For games when we'd go to parties and get tired of dancing, then we played songs like that." This

slave of Dr. Gale's also noted that they sang rebel songs for the white

people but would never sing spirituals for them. She also recalled: "You

know white folks always did like to hear niggers sing, Tll court Miss

Millie Simmons on a long summer's day'" (pp. 15, 16). Contrast this

with the songs that slave children sang for themselves. One ex-slave noted that the children sang "Old Black Joe" and "Ring a ring a Rineo."

It contained the lyrics "Ain't seen a nigger in a mile or more / You take

Sal and I take Sue / Ain't no difference between the two"?songs that

did not portray positive images of black people (p. 84). Indeed such

songs more likely contributed to a sense of negative identity for the slave

28Blassingame suggests over time, with Christianization, parents taught their children that premarital sex and shame were synonymous. These children learned little from their parents about sex except to abstain before marriage (ibid., pp. 162-63).

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 377

child. There were few opportunities for the slave children to project

healthy images of black people in their play, particularly if the play was

viewed by whites. For slave children, even social behavior such as sing-

ing songs was regulated. Their imitation of whites and blacks was care?

fully scrutinized by the masters, but also by their parents, who were

trying to protect them from chastisement and harm. Those who re?

pressed the urges to dance and party, in favor of religion, found an even

harsher situation in some cases, although in so doing they appeared to

be developing a more autonomous self-identity.29 If their parents proffered naivete, their owners rejoiced in promiscu?

ity. Slaves and owners viewed bastardy differently. Even if a slave girl who was an unwed mother was ostracized from other girls, their owners

took pride in bastards. "When I was a girl if you walked with a girl who

had had a baby we would be cut all to pieces. We wouldn't be allowed to

speak to her. Now they ain't folks if they ain't got babies" (p. 160). This

ostracism apparently reflected an African American female rite of pas?

sage, an attempt to alter the behavior ofthe slave girl, who now as a par? ent should no longer involve herself in casual prenuptial liaisons. It had

less to do with the child, for the slaves recognized no shame or illegiti-

macy in childbearing.30 The slaveowners, influenced by market consid-

erations and the necessary reproduction of the labor force, benefited

from the fecundity of prenuptial females. Otherwise, they were insensi-

tive to the cultural implications of childbirth in the slave community. "Whenever a girl had a baby in slavery they [slaveowners] never paid no

'tention to it, 'cause they knowed they would have more slaves the more

babies they got" (p. 137). "Yes, some of them had children for them

what wasn't married to you. No, they [slaveowners] wouldn't do noth-

29Erikson wrote that play was the "royal road" to the young ego's effort to make sense of its experience. Erikson felt that in play children revealed their concerns more clearly than they did in words (see Erikson, Childhood and Society, p. 98). However, play was often restricted for slave children, under the scrutiny of owners and parents. Of this behav?

ior, Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan writes that "the slaves, the oppressed depend on and share the paranoia and false beliefs of their oppressors. But since they ordinarily lack safe and convenient objects on which to project these beliefs, they project on themselves the nega? tive attributes east on them and those emanating from their condition, and an inferiority complex. It also reinforces and 'validates' the false beliefs and narcissism ofthe dominant

group" (Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression [New York, 1985], pp. 151-52). See also Charles Pinderhughes, "Managing Paranoia in Violent

Relationships," in Perspectives on Violence, ed. Gene Usdin (New York, 1972), p. 111. The

games and songs ofthe slave children are a conduit because, Fanon wrote, "in every society in every collectivity, exists?must exist?a channel, an outlet through which the forces ac- cumulated in the form of aggression can be released" (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks [New York, 1952; rpt. 1968], pp. 145-46).

30Gutman, pp. 63, 74, 557 n. 6.

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378 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

ing; they was glad of it. They would be glad to have them little bastards;

brag about it" (p. 251). "Old Miss would be setting there just knitting and watching the babies; they had a horn and every woman could tell

when it was time to come and nurse her baby by the way they would

blow the horn. The white folks was crazy 'bout their nigger babies, 'cause that's where they got their profit. A old white woman would

come there and look after them" (p. 117). Former slaves remembered as children the ceremony, or the lack of it,

associated with slave marriages. These ceremonies informed the chil?

dren of the commitment and the importance of the relationship. No

clear pattern emerges except that slaves attempted to legitimize their

relationships publicly to the community at large.31 As in courtship, children saw that the master often interfered, coupling slaves, giving

permission, or unceremoniously breaking the bond. The important de?

cision about whether and whom to marry was often made by the owner

and was not made by the slave. The slave children distinguished between

the white owners' control over their marital choices and their own. One

ex-slave explained: "That was the reason my mother had to marry again, because they would carry their husband off to one state or another.

White folks when they [their] children married they just give them all

[that] they wanted to have and let them go" (p. 141). Anne, a slave in

Wilson County, Tennessee, could not "remember seeing any of them

marry on the place" (p. 183). "Ten to one, they didn't marry at all," said

one informant (p. 217). Yet another remembered, "Sometimes they would slip there and sleep with the women and wouldn't marry at all.

They would slip just like they do now" (p. 140). There were times when

the owner simply coupled the slaves without ceremony. A female ex-

slave of Dr. Gale remembered that "my mother was born in Mississippi and brought here. My father was born in Maryland. He was an old man

when he come here, but they just bought them and put them together.

My mother was young?just fifteen or sixteen years old. She had four?

teen chillen and you know that meant a lots of wealth" (p. 5). Another

ex-slave also believed that the owner's desire for increasing wealth ac-

counted for the coupling of slaves: "They would have women that been married long time, two or three years, and didn't have no children; white folks would take them and make 'em marry somebody else, or sell 'em. Wonder what make 'em want so many children like that, make 'em

rich, I guess" (p. 207). Another woman recalled that "most ofthe time

the ole marster jest told them they was man and wife; and they was. . . .

Well, they didn't act much different after they was married; they knowed

they was man and wife; she knowed he was her husband; and the white

31Ibid., pp. 274-77.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 379

folks would built them a little hut to live in; and we would give them a

big party; and give 'em some dishes and things to put in the one room

cabin, you know" (p. 214). In other instances the informants recalled "irregular" weddings,

which were not officiated by a minister.32 One former slave, talking about irregular weddings, distinguished between big ones and little

ones. "It was considered a big wedding to jump over the broomstick, but when you just asked for them and go on to bed after getting the per? mission, then that was a little wedding. ... I never saw a wedding until I

was a great big gal," she said. "They said they use to hold a broom and

make them jump over it. At one time a man wanted a wife and all he had

to do was ask old master for the gal, and then if he said cyes' all they had

to do was to go on and go to bed. One old Mistiss by the name of

Fletcher would sometimes go and make them get up and tell them that

married life was too good for them; and tell them to get up and get out

and go to work" (p. 195).33 Another woman remembered that they

"joined their right hands. That's all they did and they said they was mar?

ried" (p. 249). An ex-slave remembered: "When they got ready to marry,

they would just come to the marster and tell him that he wanted one of

his women, and he could just take her. They didn't have no cere?

mony. . . . They jump over the broom stick in them days. I never seed

nobody marry until I was free. Niggers never knowed about marriage, because they couldn't read" (p. 300). "People marry different now from

what they use to back in those old days. When people married they had

to get an order from one master to the other master, and then set a time.

I saw them jump over the broom stick many times. The man use to jump over the broom stick and the woman would stand still" (p. 174).

A preacher- or squire-officiated wedding often followed by a supper or a dance would also be considered a "regular" wedding.34 In these

weddings the young slaves observed a more formal control of the ser?

vices. If the broomstick ceremony reflected retention of earlier magical rituals of Africans, the preacher-officiated wedding reflected the growing institutional strength of Christianity in the community. "Sometimes

Uncle Square [Squire?] Wallace would go through some sort of cere-

32Ibid., p. 275.

33Blassingame denies the existence of the broomstick ceremony except as a metaphor that parents used or as a ritual that followed a preacher-officiated ceremony. He believes that "looking back on bondage from the 1930s, blacks who had been children watching such ceremonies often conflated the wedding ritual and the post-nuptial jumping of the broom. Either they had not seen or had forgotten the wedding ceremony" (Blassingame, Slave Community, p. 167). Gutman, on the other hand, has confirmed the existence ofthe broomstick ceremony but recommends further study of its origins (Gutman, pp. 276-77).

34Gutman, p. 275.

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380 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

mony. But he didn't know a letter in the book. Sometimes Square would

marry them on Saturday night" (p. 217). "When they wanted to marry

they just ask old master, and the squire would marry them" (p. 140). "I

never went to but one wedding while I was little, I slipped off and went

to that one. My father whipped the fire out of me, too. The preacher said

some kind of ceremony out ofthe Bible, but they didn't have no license"

(p. 293). "The slaves married like they do now. If you wanted your

preacher to marry you, they would but if you didn't they would have a

white preacher. Sometime the white people would give one of the big-

gest to-do's you ever heard of. They would dance and eat and so on. Yes,

they would join right hands and the matrimony was said like they do

now" (p. 149). One informant remembered that a preacher married the

slaves in front ofthe boss's front gate and a supper and a big dance fol-

lowed (p. 260). "Two of my sisters married right where I am living now.

A preacher married them, just like they do now, only they didn't have a

license like they do now. White folks would give them a rooster and an

old hen for supper sometimes" (p. 132). The war helped to impose contractual legitimacy in the minds of Afri?

can American youth. Securing rights to their children, civil rights, army

pensions, and land ownership had more consideration than the legally sanctioned moral and sexual restraint implicit in the marriage contract

in encouraging partners to formalize their marriages, Leon Litwack has

observed.35 For the children, then, full participation in their newly won

freed status was associated with contractual and state-recognized mar?

riages. "In those times people married just like we marry now, only they didn't get a license but they would get permission from their owner first

and then from the girl's parents. Sometimes they got a preacher to marry them, and sometimes they jumped over the broom stick. When they were married by a preacher, they called that a lawful marriage, and when

the War come up if a soldier died the wife could get a pension; but if

they married by jumping over the broomstick, they didn't recognize that

if a soldier died, and his wife could get nothing" (pp. 124-25). A man

who was fourteen years old when the war ended remembered that "in

the [army] camps they was teaching them about their citizenship. I re? member well when the people had to marry over. They all come to?

gether, and the magistrate would meet them and marry them. I

remember my mother and father went and got married but some slaves wouldn't do it" (pp. 58-59).

35Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979), pp. 240-41.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 381

II

Although slave children were often deprived of sexual knowledge, it is

not necessarily true that they were shielded from the social realities evi?

dent in slavery. Testimony in the slave narratives reveals systematic and

deliberate degradation and discipline designed to prepare the youth for

a life of perpetual slavery. This pattern of abuse had implications for is?

sues of development, autonomy, individuality, identity, personality, and sense of self. Na'im Akbar writes, "The shrewd slave-makers were

fully aware that people who still respected themselves as human beings would resist to the death the dehumanizing process of slavery. There?

fore, a systematic process of creating a sense of inferiority in the proud African was necessary in order to maintain them as slaves. This was done

by humiliating and dehumanizing acts such as public beatings, parading them on slave blocks unclothed, and inspecting them as though they were cattle or horses."36 Much of the degradation that Akbar writes

about involves manipulating any sense of positive regard related to sex?

uality. Some ofthe manipulation involved repressing information. Chil?

dren for the most part were not told their birthdays; even when the

information was available they felt that their owners deliberately refused

to tell them. The degrading practices included having children eat from

troughs, as if they were animals. Slaveowners also controlled terms of

endearment by not allowing children to define who their parents were or

to use the same terms as whites used with their parents. A former slave

on Dr. Gale's plantation remembered that in slavery the children could

not call their father "papa" because the whites said "papa" but had to say

"daddy" and "mammy"; when freed they called their father "papa"

(p. 5). Historians and psychologists have applied a psychoanalytic theory to

the history of slavery. Orlando Patterson defines the process of slavery as

"social death"?"the permanent violent domination of natally alien-

ated and generally dishonored persons." In every slave society he finds

that slaves are ritually humiliated, dishonored, and estranged from their

birthright and tradition.37 On the sexual content of violence, Frantz

Fanon earlier reminded us that "we know how much sexuality there is in

all cruelties, tortures, [and] beatings."38 Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan states

that "slavery in fact reeked with violence in its crudest forms. A society founded on the exploitation of slaves was the crudest form of structural

36Na'im Akbar, Chains and Images of Psychological Slavery (Jersey City, NJ, 1984), pp. 20-21.

37Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA, 1982), pp. 1-14.

38Fanon, p. 159.

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382 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

violence."39 David Brion Davis writes: "This general [psychoanalytic] orientation helps one to understand the paradox of the slave who is

given an important role within a family's domestic economy but stands

outside the delicate dynamics of kinship psychology. Deracinated from

his own kinship group, the slave discovers that his own fate depends on

adventitious circumstance. No brethren can protect him from arbitrary

oppression or avert his murder or sexual violation."40

The attempts at control through ritualized humiliation and institu?

tionalized violence, often sexual in content, sought to reinforce in the

children the view that they were not human. Leonard Shengold has

written extensively about the effects of childhood sexual abuse and

deprivation, which he conceptualizes as "soul murder." He defines

soul murder as "the deliberate attempt to eradicate or compromise the

separate identity of another person."41 Slaves would have understood this term; they referred to their owners as "soul drivers."42 This "soul" or "psychic" murder involves killing the instinct for love in human be?

ings. Children are more vulnerable to soul murder because they desper-

ately need to maintain the image of a loving, rescuing parent or

caretaker. The double bind of slavery?the parental authority in?

formed by community mores and the owners' authority informed by market considerations?at once compounded the ignorance and the confusion of children. Children oftentimes did not have consistent

parenting from their natural parents, both because of slavery and forced separation and because the owner instead ofthe parent might be seen as a caretaker. Genovese points out that slaveowners, as part ofthe

strategy of paternalism, deliberately manipulated and exaggerated their role as caretaker during the childhood years by pampering slave children and by imposing themselves between parents and children, with dangerous consequences for the children's personal adjust? ment.43 In Eriksonian theory, betrayal by a parental figure could lead to an inability to trust other persons. There is evidence of this in the narratives. Blacks did not trust whites at all. Within the black

community there was mistrust of some members, but there is more evidence that the slaves developed trusting, close kinship relation-

39Bulhan, p. 156. 40David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), p. 16. 41Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New

Haven, CT, 1989), p. 2. In his discussion of the term, Shengold states that August Strindberg in 1887 wrote an article entitled "Soul Murder" on Henrik Ibsen's play Rosmersholm, to describe the taking away ofa person's reason for living (p. 19).

42For example, see a letter from Henry Bibb to Mr. Albert G. Sibley, November 4,1852 (in Blassingame, Slave Testimony, p. 55).

43Genovese, pp. 513-14.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 383

ships. Shengold points out that abuse, deprivation, and neglect under

conditions of dependency elicit a situation of helplessness and rage. Both of these feelings must be suppressed in order for the child to sur?

vive. These conditions were present for slave children. In many cases

the person who has experienced events that contribute to soul murder

will identify with the aggressor, a situation that sometimes occurs dur?

ing brainwashing. Some former slaves even referred to their owners as

their white families. The appropriate and expected emotions are de?

nied or deadened. Survivors of attempted soul murder often muster

considerable ego strength and, although scarred, proceed with psycho?

logical development.44 Gutman reminds us that the double bind of slavery at the same time

encouraged a biculturalism that posed a contradiction for most slave-

owners, whose social and economic livelihood required slaves to repro? duce themselves. Child-rearing by encouraging kinship and familial ties, which shaped slave behavior from one generation to another, also en?

couraged the development of an alternative, even oppositional culture

to that of their masters. As Gutman writes, "What a slave child learned

always depended upon how that child was taught and who taught that

child. . . . A bicultural analysis of slave socialization together with an

awareness of the relationship between the slave family and the enlarged kin group allows us to view the slave family as more than an owner-

sponsored device to reproduce the labor force and to maintain csocial

control.'. . . Passageways for a developing slave culture shaped the inte?

rior fabric ofthe developing slave communities, and also served to socia-

44It is clear from the narratives that despite the similarities in the slavery experience, there were indeed variations in the former slaves5 responses to their experiences. There was

clearly not one identifiable internalized slave personality, as suggested by Stanley Elkins's

early work, despite the fact that many slaves were observed to behave in stereotyped ways; see Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (Chi? cago, 1959). Charles Pinderhughes, in taking issue with the simplicity of Elkins's 1959 work, focused on Elkins's perception that blacks were infantilized and whites internalized. He noted that in American and western European cultures, active mastery and competi? tion were valued as traditionally masculine roles, while female roles were devalued. He ar?

gued that "controlling, demanding, self-centered, self-entitling, narcissistic, infantile roles were idealized and assumed by white masters while parental roles of feeding, cleaning, and

serving were demeaned and pressed upon black slaves and servants. In this sense, whites were infantilized toward the omnipotent controlling role of infants and blacks were

paternalized toward the feeding, cleaning, service-on-demand role of mothers."

Pinderhughes pointed to not only the complexity ofthe condition of slavery, but also the shared, demeaning effects on both blacks and whites. See Charles A. Pinderhughes, "Ques? tions of Content and Process in the Perception of Slavery," in The Debate over Slavery, ed. Ann J. Lane (Urbana, IL, 1971), pp. 102-8.

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384 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

lize the slave child."45 This cultural adaptation and family formation

more than anything else allowed the slave to contend with the abuse,

degradation, and humiliation of slavery. An institutionalized practice that degraded and humiliated slave

children was their owners' deliberate disallowance of underwear. Forc?

ing children to advance into puberty without underpants shamed

them. It is clear that slave children wanted appropriate clothing and

that they had a sense of shame regarding their lack of it. Children be?

came painfully aware of this as they began their adult sexual develop? ment. Possessing real clothing was often related to a change in status, such as growth into the adult workforce or marriage.46 Boys and girls wore nothing but gender-undifferentiated shirts or "shimmys" and

only received breeches or dresses once they began adult-level chores or

moved into the house or to town. Winger Vanhook remembered, "All

de black chillun wore a long shirt. It come down to de middle ob de

legs, an' you couldn't tell a gal from a boy."47 "Colored children didn't

wear drawers, and you'd knit your own stockings," recalled a Tennes-

see woman (p. 5). Another woman confirmed that children had to knit

socks themselves, adding, "I never want to see no more brown stock?

ings and things; I never did like brown, looks so dirty, just like mud"

(p. 205). A former slave from Henry County, Tennessee, said that

"when boys got pretty large they wore body breeches. They wore a shirt

and nothing else until they got a certain age" (p. 294). One former

slave, who described himself as "quite a small boy about fourteen years

old," said, "[We] never did know what a undershirt was in them days, and no underwear of any kind, summer nor winter. Sometimes we

would get some old summer breeches that was wore out, and we would

wear them for underwear in the winter" (p. 216). A woman ex-slave

from Arrington, Tennessee, remembered that "we had red flannel

clothes in the winter. In the summer we went about with not a God's

thing on but a cshimmy.' We always went in our cshimmy tails' in the

summer" (p. 136). One male ex-slave from Hardeman County, Ten?

nessee, remembered that "we wore great long shirts until we was great

big boys" (p. 76); another ex-slave remembered that on their planta-

45Gutman, pp. 261-62; see also Escott, pp. 18-35.

46Eugene Genovese writes that the child's embarrassment at the exposure of private parts by wearing slips without underpants requires no explanation. On the other hand, he excuses the owners' culpability as a blind spot, for "the sexual prudery ofthe whites always went along with a failure to notice blacks, so that naked children, not always small, romped everywhere" (Genovese, p. 505). Yet the treatment here seems to fit a pattern that Orlando Patterson describes as ritual humiliation designed by the slaveowners deliberately to degrade and shame the slaves (Patterson, pp. 1-14).

47James Mellon, ed., Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember (New York, 1988), p. 38.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 385

tion the women, including his mother, wove cloths, four cuts each

night before bed; nevertheless the "boys until they got up large enough to work wore little slips. We called them shirts; they'd sew it up like a sack and cut a whole in the neck for your head to go through, and you wore that until you were ten or twelve years old. There was not much

difference in the dress of girls and boys" (p. 56). Although dress was

gender-undifferentiated, the slave child was painfully aware of gender differences and the degradation caused by the lack of appropriate

clothing. "In the summer time we would go around half naked," one

individual, "Massa's slave son," recalled. He remembered that "we

didn't wear nothing but one piece?a shirt that come down below

your knees" (p. 82). Another woman remembered that when her black-

as-satin grandfather married her black-as-satin grandmother, "he

didn't have on nothing but a shirt, that's all they give them to wear

then" (pp. 309-10). It is no wonder that a former slave recalled, "Why the darkies thought they couldn't do without their underwear in them

days" (p. 213). Girls aware of their sexual vulnerability developed a sense of mod-

esty, covering up their bodies. They recalled that their dresses often did

not fit. "The white gingham dresses would be so narrow they would split them" (pp. 5-6). "The women wore theirs straight too, and they called

them sacks. Sometimes it would fit and sometimes it wouldn't" (p. 56). "We wore hoop skirts on Sundays jest like the white folks. I never did

like them things; if you didn't sit down this-a-way, that old hoop skirt

would shoot up like this. We did not wear short dresses. Then we wore

white waists, and a real long skirt. The, you know, the style come in of

wearing these here long things that warn't 'xactly no drawers?come

way down to yo' ankles, and we wore them, too, jest like the white folks"

(p. 205). "The clothes resembled them Sister Sutton [an elderly infor?

mant also present at the interview] had on. You would never see a grown woman with a dress on shorter than hers, and sometimes they would be

longer. When they dressed up on Sunday their dresses would drag on

the ground" (p. 37). There is little doubt that a sense of modesty and de?

cency was evident in slave girls.

Boys too wanted pants, for having clothing made them feel more like

persons, more human. One man recalled that he was seven years or older

when he got his first pair of pants?when he moved from the country? side to Bowling Green (p. 92). Frederick Douglass likewise was about seven or eight years old, preparing for his trip to Baltimore, when he got his first pair of pants. He wrote that he washed in the creek for three

days, for Miss Lucretia had promised him a pair of trousers if he got all

the dirt and dead skin off. "The thought of owning a pair of trousers was

great indeed! It was almost sufficient motive, not only to make me take

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386 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

off what would be called by the pig drovers the mange, but the skin

itself."48

Slaveowners were persistent in equating and treating the children and

their parents as stock or domestic animals, and in some instances as

pets. Family members were separated from one another, sold, or given

away indiscriminately. It was very difficult for slaves to develop a posi? tive self-esteem and self-image when they were treated as if they were ani?

mals. Their worth was related by their owners to physical size, to how

much money a slave would sell for, to how many children a slave could

breed. Ego strength ultimately came from their ability to recognize the

cruelty and mean-spiritedness of their owners and to develop, in contra-

distinction, their own set of values and sense of body-ego. In doing so

they recognized the absurdity of treating people like stock and criticized

their owners for degrading people thus.

The informants associated their owners' buying and selling of slaves

as equating them with animals. Mules, horses, hogs, pigs, and dogs were

common terms used by slaves when discussing their owners' sale of

slaves. Slave children saw people sold from the public square?put on

the block like stock. "Back there they bought and sold colored people

just like they do horses and mules now. Many husbands, wives and chil?

dren were separated then and never met again" (p. 121). One man re?

called that "I never have seen my mother since I left, or my sister or

brother. Diana was my mother's only girl," and he said that "the man

who sold me was a speculator in slaves. Buy them just like mules" (pp.

104-6). "[The owner] was mean to them, even if he was going with

them. Ifhis wife find it out he would have to sell her (Negro concubine). He would sell his own children by slave women just like he would any others. Just since he was making money. In slavery, niggers and mules

was white folks' living. They would sell for $500 and $1,000. My mother sold for $1,000" (p. 298). "They would drive slaves off just like

they do hogs now" (p. 305). When "old Charlie Merrill, the nigger

trader, come along they sold my daddy [who had killed his overseer] to

him, and he carried him way down in Mississippi. Ole Merrill would buy all the time, buy and sell niggers just like hogs. They sold him Aunt

Phoebe's little baby that was just toddling long, and Uncle Dick?that

was my mammy's brother" (p. 116). The intrapersonal violence of slavebreeding cannot be underesti-

mated, for the equation of slaves with domestic animals and market

value was not lost upon slave children. Slaves were depicted by their

48Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [1845], in Michael

Meyer, ed., Frederick Douglass: The Narrative and Selected Writings (New York, 1984), p. 42.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 387

owners as cattle and without human morals; breeding was an important

aspect of this. Informants remembered slaveowners calling a man

"nigger buck and a woman a nigger winch," whom they would buy and

carry down to a Mississippi cotton plantation, where suckling babies could be sold from their mothers (pp. 44-45). "Fve seen droves of'em

come through, all chained together. And I laughed; I didn't know no

better. ... I was just a little motherless child, kicked and knocked

about" (p. 254). "In Lexington, Kentucky, between Bowling Green and

Louisville, was a great place for tobacco and flax. They would raise

darkies there and place them in droves along the road having a rope be?

tween them like these big cable ropes. They would have the left hands of

two people tied to the same rope so they could not run away. A mother would walk along with a child, a suckling, and they would take her and sell her from that child like taking a mother from her pigs" (p. 169). In

selling mothers from their children, slaveowners "thought Negroes were cattle and stock" (p. 173). Dr. Gale's ex-slave, whose own parents had been coupled, remembered: "They would buy a fine girl and a fine man and just put them together like cattle; they would not stop to marry them. If she was a good breeder, they was proud of her." Dr. Gale "had a

regular farm of slaves he'd just raise them to sell" either to his Louisiana

plantation or to hire out locally (p. 1). "Some ofthe ole marsas used to have the colored folks; and they would take women away from their chil? dren just like you would sell a hog or something. Aw, Chile, you better be glad you warn't here in them days. You couldn't do nothin' but cry; better not say you didn't want to go, er nothin'. Sho' was awful" (pp. 204-5). Mrs. Sutton believed that "whenever they'd get overstocked with niggers, like cattle, now-a-days, they would gather up all the

niggers and have a big block and stan' them up there, and there was a man to cry them off. He would put up a girl, and say, cHow much am I offered for her?' Someone would say Tive Hundred doilars'; then

maybe someone else would say Tive Hundred and fifty doilars' till they disposed of all of them" (p. 31). "It is very seldom you can get a colored

person to tell you anything about slavery. The white folks ain't gonna tell you. Women wasn't anything but cattle" (p. 92).

If slave children did not know where babies came from, they did know where the value of the babies went?to the owner. Slaveowners were quick to speak of their slave children within their earshot as poten? tial breeders. One woman, an ex-slave of Dr. Gale, said: "I was stout and

they were saving me for a breeding woman but by the time I was big enough I was free. ... I'd hear them saying, cShe's got a fine shape; she'U make a good breeder,' but I didn't know what they were talking about"

(p. 1). She may not have known what they were talking about but her life

script was being written for her. Her mother, who had been coupled

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388 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

with her father, had fourteen children; her aunt in Mississippi had

twenty children. Another woman, only four years old when slavery ended, related that her mistress "used to say I wouldn't sell her for noth?

ing. I wouldn't take less than a thousand dollars for him [her brother] and I wouldn't take two thousand for her; cthat's my little breeder.'

Mother said I cussed and said, cDamn you, I won't never be no breeder

for you.' I don't know how I learned to cuss" (p. 156). Willie Williams

recalled in the same vein his master coming into the nursery: "De

marster lots ob times looks dem over an' points out an' says, ?Dat one

will be wo'th a thousan' dollars,' an' he points to anudder an' says, cDat

one will be a whopper.' You see, twas jus' lak raisin' de mules: if you don't hurts dem when dey am young, you gits good strong niggers when

dey am big."49 Still another ex-slave recalled that they kept her grand- mother as a house girl because she was "young and supple and could

have lots of children. Ain't that hard? . . . You see, their object was to

raise her and sell her so she would make a lot of money for them" (p.

309). An elderly ex-slave, fifteen years old when the war began, recalled

that "they would see children and give them candy; if they looked

healthy they would buy them and raise them up. They would look at

them and say, cthat's a mighty fine nigger'" (p. 105). In some cases, the children believed that marriages were not granted

to male slaves who were not big and healthy, because the owners did not

feel these men would sire healthy slaves for them. For males, sexual

rights were related to size and ability to add income to the slaveowners.

Identity was, then, much concerned with size and strength. The message was that puny men were denied wives and sexual rights. They also

brought less income if sold by their masters. Girls too were appraised

early as potential breeders for the masters: fertile women were prized; barren women were devalued.50 One man, who was ten years old when

slavery ended, recalled that his crippled "mother [was] put on the block

three times, and they couldn't sell her. They tried to bid her off for a

49Mellon, ed., p. 39. 50At the same time the black male was more disenfranchised from his sexual status than

was the female. Women were valued for their procreative functions, while males were feared for their sexuality. Apart from the female slave's value as a breeder, "she often

played a critical maternal role in the lives of white children," serving as wet nurse and pri? mary caretaking figure. She was a valued figure, and yet in slavery the white child was often

separated from this treasured person. This painful loss led to an unconscious love-hate atti? tude on the part of southern whites toward their black nurses and blacks in general. "The

importance of blacks was unconsciously disavowed by whites; however this repressed grief was an important factor in race relations during slavery" (Stephen M. Weissman, "Frederkk Douglass, Portrait of a Black Militant: A Study in the Family Romance," Psy? choanalytic Study ofthe Child 30 [1975]: 750).

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 389

dime, but nobody would give it. . . . Why, in them days, they would sell

a baby from its mother and a mother from her baby, like cows and

calves, and think no more of it" (p. 278). Men and women might be

coupled with one another to promote fecundity. Mr. Huddleston, a for?

mer slave, stated: "A woman who bore children fast, they would sell her

for as much as a man. A woman who was barren, they wouldn't sell her

for so much. . . . Maybe a woman would sell, a woman and her baby would be put up. Maybe someone wouldn't want the baby, but they would want the mother; then the baby would be sold to someone else.

That's the reason niggers are so scattered out, 'cause they never would

sell them as family, but as individuals. . . . Maybe if a scrubby looking

nigger like me would ask the girl's mass'r, he wouldn't let her marry; but

take a sturdy stock of niggers, he would be glad to have him" (pp. 31,

33, 41-42). A former slave, twelve years old when slavery ended, re?

membered that "when they got ready to marry, they would just come to

the marster and tell him that he wanted one of his women, and he could

just take her. They didn't have no ceremony. They wouldn't let a

scrubby man come in among them; but if he was healthy he could just take her and start living with her. They jump over the broom stick in

them days. I never see nobody marry until I was free. Niggers never

knowed about marriage, because they couldn't read" (p. 300). One ex-

slave, whose father was a member of the master's family, related that "I

would ask him [a girl's master], if I wanted his girl; and if I was a Negro that was profitable and would increase other families, I could marry. Then I would ask my master, and if he gave his consent too, I could

marry, but without it I couldn't" (p. 101). He also remembered it being said by Mary, the black overseer at a plantation in Texas, that his fingers were too short to pick cotton. What, in his boyhood mind, would be his

likely prospects for marriage? On the other hand, an ex-slave, eight years old when slavery ended, believed that "a great big nigger like me would

bring four or five thousand doilars but a little nigger wouldn't bring

nothing hardly. Nobody didn't want a little puny nigger" (p. 305). Childhood memories of sexual violence recall whites exaggerating

the slaves' sexual or carnal natures, seeking to dehumanize them. Such

violence serves as a stumbling block toward the development of healthy

sexuality and an integrated personality. At the same time the whites

around them offered few healthy developmental role models, for

healthy people do not degrade, sell, rape, and torture people.51 The be-

51Herbert Gutman suggests that such sexual punishments were more than simply per? sonal idiosyncrasies; rather, they are demonstrative of ritualistic cruelties. He recommends further study of southern white sexual mores to understand this pattern of punishment (Gutman, pp. 395-96).

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390 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

havior of whites made growing into maturity as a slave a depressing and

frightening prospect. One ex-slave recollected the habitual hazing of

bathing blacks for no reason other than to harass and humiliate them in

their nakedness. "Slaves would be in the river washing sometimes, and

the paddie rollers would come along and see them, and they would

throw their clothes up in the trees; and I have seen them running with

not a string around them. They wouldn't have time to put nothing on if

they had their clothes, 'cause they was running them so close" (pp. 132-

33). One former slave girl, ten years old when slavery ended, recalled

that "when we was little, she [the mistress] use to whip us and then make

us kiss the switch. She was the meanest one ofthe daughters" (p. 280). This may be the only reference to kissing in these narratives. Either the

children did not see their parents kiss or they did not speak of it. Usually a kiss is presented as a gentle, positive action, but here it is coupled with

the sadistic whip. The slave must kiss it. The message is, "I know that

you have been bad, even though that may not be so, and you should be

thankful to me for correcting you." In another instance a former slave

recalled that her mistress had led women around by their ears with hot

tongs, saying to them that these were their earrings (p. 194). Women for

the most part were deprived of the adornment of earrings, which are

usually used to make one attractive; yet here the accessory of cruelty and

painful disfigurement is called an earring. The same mistress once

threatened to cut out the baby from a pregnant woman's belly, a further

reminder that the fruit ofa woman's sexuality could be destroyed. It was

not her own.

From the point of view ofthe child, sadistic punishment distorted the

sexuality ofthe master, but the violation was particularly frightening if a

parent was the target. If not, the child easily projected this possibility onto a parent.52 "I seed one of our young marsters take an old colored

woman and pull her clothes down to her waist and whip her with a cow-

hide," said one former slave girl. "It's a strange thing to me that they would never try to whip my mammy, but I think that old Marster Jack was the cause of that." She rationalized, equating her mother fully with

her mistress, that "she just had trouble with mistress, and he said he

wished they might try to help her out, cause she was a woman and Nancy [the slave] was a woman." This is one of the few references in which

whites are remembered as referring to a female slave as a woman, a term

usually reserved for the white female. In this case the slave and the white

woman are both equated as women (p. 282). One former slave remem?

bered that Old Bufford, whose "darkies had chillen by him," tried to force her mother sexually, "and Mammy wouldn't do it; and I've seen

52Fanon, p. 145.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 391

him take a paddle with holes in it and beat her, and everywhere it hit it

raised a blister; then he would take a switch and break them blisters"

(p.118). In slavery, the message was that the woman's body was not her own;

if she exercised a personal right she was not simply punished but pub?

licly humiliated and dehumanized. The stripping of clothing meant that

the violent act cut down to the primal essence ofthe victim and the slave

community at large, revealing to the child her elemental vulnerability. A

former woman slave remembered that "when they commenced selling the niggers they would have to strip naked" to be examined. "It was

awful to see the condition of some of the women, especially. Some of

them were pregnant" (pp. 193-94). A former slave named Martha

Harrison remembered that "the way they would whip you was like they done my oldest sister. They tied her, and they had a place just like they're

gonna barbecue a hog; and they would strip you and tie you and lay you down" (pp. 116-17). "When they would whip you they would tear your back all to pieces," remembered one ex-slave, who described himself as a

fifteen-year-old boy when the war began. "Child, they didn't care for

you. We had to stand in fear of them, we had no protection. They would

take your clothes off and whip you like you was no more than mules" (p.

105). Yet another recalled an incident when "they beat us till the blood

run down our legs. When we left here we was naked; my sister was the

weaver and she was weaving some clothes for us, and old mistress took

that stuff off the loom and took it upstairs and hid it. We went away naked. . . . Yes, when we left there we had our dresses pulled round in

front to hide our nakedness" (pp. 276, 279). In developing a sense of sexual identity the prospect of sexually in-

spired physical violence was omnipresent. Children not only learned

that white men commonly forced themselves upon black women but

that the consequences of resisting could be fatal (p. 51). Slave children

learned that if women resisted they could be sold south, separated from

their babies, and beaten. A slave woman remembered when she was a

child on Dr. Gale's plantation that not all women had sexual relations

with white men; of those who did, some went willingly but others were

forced: "They had a horror of going to Mississippi and they would do

anything to keep from it" (p. 2). At that time, Mississippi was seen as the

worst place for a slave to be held. She recalled that her master allowed

Aunt Mary Jane to marry a "yellow man" because he knew he could have

her anytime he wanted. "He dressed her up in red?red dress, red band

and rosette around her head, and a red sash with a big red bow." Her

dark-skinned aunt "had two yellow girls to wait on her!" A dance fol-

lowed the wedding, but the churched couple did not dance. The whites

watched (p. 8). A former slave from Hardeman County, Tennessee, re-

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392 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

called a slave named John, "a big double-jointed man," who confronted

his owner for making advances to his wife. "John run old man

Chapman, for some ofthe hands told him that Chapman had been after

his wife, and John got after him about it. Old Chapman had a gun and

John tried to take it away from him and Old Chapman shot him in the

arm. . . . He taken his wife and went to Mississippi, and carried John's wife too. John kept on disputing with master and master tapped him

over the head with his walking cane" (p. 76). Black men who resisted the

rape of their wives and loved ones were choosing death. A slaveowner

named Sam Watkins "would ship their husbands (slaves) out of bed and

get in with their wives." One man killed Watkins, although "he knew it

was death" (p. 2). According to Stephen M. Weissman, "The frequent

disruptions of the black family unit were partially related to uncon?

scious retaliatory envy. The white man's need to repress his childhood

emotional tie to blacks often took the extreme form of seeing them as

subhuman or nonhuman. Tenderness was replaced by cruelty in what

could be described as a cultural reaction formation. The power and in-

tensity of the white man's exaggerated sexual fear of the black man was

probably related to the power and intensity of his own unconsciously determined incestuous wishes toward black women and its accompany-

ing retaliatory fears."53 Boys and girls observed that the owners did not

respect the sanctity of the marriage bed and that resistance had dire

consequences. In most cases, the children observed that slave women had little

choice but to be involved in the liaisons that produced mixed-race chil?

dren. In some cases, slave women might have sought the relationships, but the cost was great. These children were sometimes not trusted by the

other slaves, because of their biological and social relationships with

whites. The miscegenation added further confusion to a slave's sense of

self-worth. Was it better to be half white, since being black was despised? Yet in many cases the offspring were treated just the same as blacks or

were despised by the whites whom they resembled, and who feared

them. Sometimes, slave children of owners and their mothers had spe? cial privileges. Most continued their status as slaves, although after slav?

ery ended, some were deeded land and given some support by their

white families.54 One woman whose husband's father was the master re-

53Weissman, p. 750. 54Frederick Douglass was born ofa slave mother and an unknown white man. He was

separated from his mother at birth and raised by his maternal grandparents, who raised other grandchildren as well. Douglass was sent away for a time and then returned to live in his (presumably) master/father's home, where he received some affection. Douglass re? jected the idea of slavery early in his life and met his hero William Lloyd Garrison, accord? ing to Weissman, at an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket. A strong bond of friendship

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 393

membered that "marsa had a brother to have a child by one ofthe slaves.

'Course he wouldn't own him, but everybody knowed it, he would give it things, but they treated him (the baby boy) like they did all the other

slaves, no'm, didn't make no difference toward him. Well, some of them

thought it was an honor to have the marsa, but I didn't want no white

man foolin' with me" (pp. 207-8). Another recalled, "I know plenty of

slaves (women) who went with the old marster. They had to do it or get a killing. They couldn't help it. Some of them would raise large families

by their owner. I know an old banker in Lebanon who gave one of his

children a home after they come free" (p. 51). "Aunt Millie" who had

master's son lived on a plantation but was free, paid for by a white per? son. They called her "widow woman" because she lived alone (p. 55). A

woman from Nashville remembered a man on the Pike. "I know when I

went off he bought a woman, and this woman came from Arkansas, and

this here man got with her and got this boy and she got him, and then

she turned round and had a black one, and he turned around and sold it.

He bought her from Miss Porter and she got jealous and she turned

round and had a dark child and he sold [it]" (p. 252). Issues of identity and sexuality were complicated further when the

child was a blood relative ofthe slaveowner or his white employee. Some

of the former slaves pointed out that the slaveowners tried not to show

any favoritism. In some cases, they were sold by their relatives. What did

it mean to be sold by your father? What did it mean to be seen as less

than human by your relatives?55 One ex-slave remembered that "some of

them would treat these [mixed-blood] children better, and some of them

wouldn't" (p. 34). Another ex-slave remembered that when he was

twelve years old he was sold by his half-brother, "mighty near like

Joseph" (p. 86). On the Gale plantation, a woman remembered, her

"grandfather was an Irishman and he was a foreman, but he had to whip his children and grandchildren just like the others." Gale, himself, had

his children work the same as other slaves and call him "marster," and

ensued, and they traveled the abolitionist circuit, with Douglass emotionally recounting his life under slavery and Garrison eloquently denouncing slavery in a manner that left the audience spellbound (ibid., pp. 729-50).

55Weissman emphasizes the inconsistent, disguised threads of positive feelings that

Douglass had for his white family, saying "These relations were intimate with deep, uncon? scious, incestuous undercurrents. Douglass was raised as $ second-class member of his master's family and received a great deal of special attention and consideration compared to the standard treatment of slave children." Weissman believes that this ambivalent form of black-white interaction was common during slavery and had some of its unconscious roots in early childhood experiences. Indeed for the slave with a white parent, the potential for the ambivalent feelings was great (Weissman, p. 749).

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394 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

the overseer whipped them like the others. "The only advantage they had was that Marster Gale wouldn't sell them" (p. 3). A witness, a

fifteen-year-old boy when the war began, recalled that "they wouldn't

make no difference in the half-white slaves. They would get whippings

just like we would" (p. 106). Another remembered that the whites

treated their children the same as other slaves. "They mighta liked them

a little better, but they didn't want to show it" (p. 217). Still another re?

called that the children were whipped the same as the others and sold

from the block. "They would take them to town and put them on the

block, and he was the father of them" (p. 252). The commingling of

race with sex and with the violent separations and whippings illustrate

the sexual content of the violence about which Fanon wrote.

Often mistresses who felt threatened by the relationships that their

husbands had with black women took out their frustration and anger on

the resulting children. Dr. Gale's ex-slave remembered a practice that

when whites married, the husband would be given a slave cook as a gift,

by whom he then had children. They "sometimes favored him so much

that the wife would be mean to them and make him sell them. If they had nice long hair she would cut it off and wouldn't let them wear it

long like white children" (p. 1). Another informant recalled one family of half-white children of the master on the plantation. "The old lady would be meaner to them than she was to the black ones." She "would

not have one of them for a house servant. She would get one right black

and wouldn't have none of them in there looking as white as her" (p.

261). In another narrative, an ex-slave recounted the killing ofa slave

who was presumably half white. One can assume that because ofthe at?

tention paid to her hair, it was not to her advantage that she bore some

resemblance to a white woman. "A woman named Charlotte had real

long hair and they cut one side of her hair off and left the other side long.

They whipped her one evening for the longest, and told her to get over

the barb wire fence, and she said she couldn't, and he jerked her through

by the hair, and she never did come to. She was a corpse in ten minutes

after they jerked her through" (p. 135). In yet another case, a mistress was haunted by her slave grandson's

similarity to her own son and, like Charlotte, his hair became the object of ridicule and torture. This child lived in the house with the family but

was accorded a special status. In this case the mistress would ask him

what he had on his head. When he would answer "hair" she would tell him that it was wool. He told interviewers that she used to pull his hair

out by the handfuls when he was a child. Again, the slave was subject to

conflicting thoughts about his parentage, his bondage, and his physical appearance. In this case the slave grandson was given property at the war's end, but his memory of his grandmother's cruelty remained clear

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 395

for many years. Yet his memory of his father turned vitriolic. "I was rid-

ing on a streetcar long after freedom and I passed the cemetery where

my father was buried. I started cussing?clet me get off this damn car

and go see where my God damn father is buried, so I can spit on his

grave, a God damn son-of-a-bitch.' I got no mercy on nobody who bring

up their children like dogs. How could any father treat their child like

that? Bring them up to be ignorant like they did us. If I had my way with

them all I would like to have a chopping block and chop every one of

their heads off" (pp. 83-84). This man clearly had anger at his treat?

ment by his master/father that had survived for decades.

Slave children, especially those of mixed race, might create in fantasy a family romance. The "family romance" is a psychoanalytic concept wherein the individual, in recalling events of his life, sometimes modi-

fies and fantasizes a better scenario. An abused child, for instance, might fantasize that the abusing natural parent is really a step-parent, and

when the powerful real parent realizes that he exists, he will be rescued.

Weissman studied three biographies written by Douglass. He stresses

that, in his opinion, Douglass develops a family romance, a set of fic?

tional parents who create an idealized "good." This mental novel of

early childhood is capable of being revised and rewritten at different

stages of one's life. Like many mythological stories of birth, the hero is a

secret, unacknowledged issue of parents of high station. The hero is

raised by surrogate parents and in time comes to know the identity of his

true parents.56 Margaret Lavine's family romance contained a grand- mother who was stolen from Spain and made a slave and a mother who

had driven away the Indians. This former slave said that her mother, for

whom she was named, was half Indian and half Spanish. Her father was

white, "of course." Her mother was the overseer, hired the hands, and

was "kind of the boss around there about things about the house. ... I

remember mother crying and mistress got in bed with her. She slept

right with mother. We had trundle beds then." Concerning Margaret and her siblings, the Yankees said to her mistress, "Goddamn, these

must be your grandchildren the way you are carrying on about them"

(pp. 198-99). They very likely were.

In other instances, the children had fantasies about white women

having close relationships with slaves who might have been biologically related to them. In some instances the relationships had a confusing mixture of love and degradation. In one case, the mistress was reported to have "saved" a pretty slave girl for her son. "A white woman would

have a maid sometimes who was nice looking, and she would keep her

56Weissman, p. 729. For another example ofa family romance, see the autobiography of Sella Martin written in 1867 (Blassingame, Slave Testimony, pp. 703-4).

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396 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

and her son would have children by her" (p. 2). What was the message then? To be chosen as the pretty slave had advantages, but costs as well.

Here, the man was not choosing the slave woman, but she was being chosen for him by another woman, who would be related to any

progeny. In some cases, slave children were treated as treasured pets of their

white owners. Often the child was the pet ofthe mistress, given to her

as a gift. In at least one instance, however, the child was also the valued

pet ofthe master. An informant named Mrs. Moore, eleven years old

when slavery ended, remembered that her mistress cried "'cause we

were the same as her children" after her children were grown. She also

remembered that "when I lived with the white folks, I stayed in the

house most of the time," but unlike the white children "they fed me

right there in the room, on the floor" (pp. 39-40). One former slave

noted that, from the time she was a baby, "I slept with ole mistiss till I

was too big and used to kick her and they made me a pallet on the floor, and I never stayed in her bed anymore" (p. 182). Another former slave

said that his mistress "mothered and raised" slave children (p. 221). One woman remembered that when she was a child they sometimes

paired children as companions when a slave and the mistress had chil?

dren the same age. She recollected about her own situation: "I never

called ole Miss nothing but cmother' in my life" (p. 249). She slept in a

trundle bed in the mistress's room as a child. This woman grew up to

become a special maid to the mistress, and she traveled extensively with the mistress, unlike other slaves on the plantation. Like others, she spoke of the mistress's family as her "white family" when asked

to describe the family of her childhood. Indeed, the relationship between the slave children and the white owners was complex in such

situations.

Like the woman who traveled with her mistress, another woman de?

scribed her life as a special maid or nurse to her mistress. She described

herself as being mulatto, having a Quaker father. This fact did not keep her from being given away as a gift to her mistress when she was five

years old. She describes a case when she was put on display and revered

by her owners. "My young master would have had a fit if I had married. I

wasn't thinking about no marriage. I had my company to come to see

me. They dressed me awfully nice. My mistess, she would say, cGo

wash,' meaning take a bath, and cthen I will come and dress you.' She

would dress me in her clothes, from skin out. The boys just thought some ofthe girls were doll babies. That's what they thought about me, with my curls and dressed up so nice." She continued, "Yes, I went to

parties and danced all night on Saturday night, dressed to death. I used to go to parties, and they all treated me nice. I never had a young man

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 397

white or colored to say an ugly word to me, because my young master

was very strict with me" (pp. 243, 227). This passage indicates that in these situations the child, as her mas-

ter's watch and ward, clearly had a status different from the other slaves, since her master would have been upset by either her mistreatment or

sexual advances toward her. She was valued for her attractiveness to the

"boys." One wonders, however, who the boys were, and what treatment

the boys gave to her. In some ways, it sounds as if this attractive child

might have been being prepared by her surrogate father to give sexual

favors to the company, or for the master himself. She noted her curls.

She also made reference to being dressed to death and dressed from the

"skin out."

She was obviously aware of her similarity to and differences from

whites and other slaves, as was an ex-slave named Lucy, who watched

her mistress apply rouge to herself to "make her cheeks real nice and

rosy; 'course me, smart, would go right behind her and rub my cheeks,

too; and 'course I wasn't the right color. I would say, cMy cheeks don't

git red as your'n,' and she would say, cLucy, you have to rub 'em harder,'

he, he, he. I didn't know, I was so silly and young, but smart. Chile, I

was sharp as a tack" (p. 20). For both slave girls described above, their

developing sense of identity included incorporating aspects of both

worlds, when indeed they did not fit comfortably into either. Similarly, another former slave vividly remembered that after being given to her

new mistress at age six, the mistress washed her and made her new

clothes?"a dress and some drawers and a drawer body." She said: "I

was never dressed so fine in my life, and I just thought everybody was

looking at me because I was dressed so fine. . . . The dress had some red

in it and some big flowers in it, and I was looking at myself in the glass and I would pull up my dress and look at my pretty clean drawers and

things, and when I went in the room where my mistress was I pulled it

up again and started looking and saying to myself, cDon't I look nice

and clean under here,' and my mistress said, Tou mustn't do that, that's

ugly,' and so then I went out in the woods where there was lots of cedars

thick around, and I got down there and pulled up my dress and just looked and danced and danced" (p. 264).

Another woman was raised by her white mistress with her older

brother when their mother died in childbirth. She noted that her mis?

tress made an effort to "keep me from messing and mixing with every? body." The mistress was not happy if she played with slaves or poor white children. She went on to note that as a free adult, she continued to

discriminate with regard to the persons with whom she interacted. Her

father, who lived on another farm, continued to visit the children after

the mother's death, every other week. After the war, her father came to

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398 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

retrieve her from the mistress, but she refused to leave with him. The

mistress threatened to whip the girl if she showed any interest in leaving with her father. Finally the father, after several trips, told the child how

the mistress had mistreated her own mother. She then left with her fa?

ther but returned many times to visit. This narrative accurately describes

the ambivalence of the slaves, particularly those who felt favored by their owners. Despite the fact that they were mistreated, they often iden?

tified with whites (pp. 60-69). Likewise, another woman remembered

that after the death of her mistress (whom she thought of as a mother), she told her master when asked if she would stay, "I'll go home" to Mis-

sissippi. Her master cried that it was her mistress's wish for her to stay with the white children. "I had a little boy [beau] down there I was crazy

about, and I wanted to go back to him," yet she remained in Tennessee

(p. 266). The loss of parents (through absence or death) combined with

living in the master's household was a confusing situation for a slave

child. When racial origins were unknown, or racial identity was ambigu-

ous, it often presented an even more confusing picture. When slave children spoke of grooming, they often compared their

physical features to those of white children. Invariably, the slave child

did not benefit from the comparison. As noted earlier, the slave child

was at both an advantage and a disadvantage if he had some characteris?

tics in common with whites. Although skin color was often mentioned, hair was also a particular area of focus. White people resented slave chil?

dren who had hair like that of whites, as shown in the cases above, where

the former slaves remembered the mistress cutting off their hair and not

letting them wear it like white children; the slave child's white grand- mother pulling out his hair, referring to it as wool; the slave woman

being jerked through the fence by her hair, resulting in her death. Chil?

dren made references to the care of their hair during slavery. "Chillen

was just as lousy as pigs. They had these combs that was just like cards

you ccard' cotton with, and they would comb your head with them.

They wouldn't get the lice out, but it would make it feel better. They had

to use larkspur to get 'em out; that would always get lice out of your head" (p. 115). Another slave who was raised in Virginia noted, "In

them days they made me comb my hair with an old kyard (card) what we

used for spinning" (p. 110). In a particular narrative, a slave noted that his hair was cared for by

another species. "Me and my brother was in the trading yard before the

Civil War. We stayed in there three or four weeks. They would fix us up and carry us in a great big old room and circle us all around every morn?

ing and every evening. They would have us up in a showroom to show us to the people. They would hit us in the breast to see if we was strong and sound. Monkeys would play with us and see if any boogies was in our

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 399

heads. They would do pretty well if they found any, but if they didn't

they would slap us. They had the monkeys there to keep our heads

clean" (p. 75). This must have been a particularly confusing and humili-

ating experience for these two slave boys. Again, they were valued for

their strength but humiliated by people and by monkeys. In other cases, slave children were allowed to bathe nightly, and these

children combed and wrapped their hair in cotton strings (p. 307). An?

other slave noted the difference in her grooming when staying with two

different families. "I had never been clean like that before, and staying with them po' white folks I had had a time with those body lice. They would get so bad I would take my dress off and rub it in the suds and

rinse it out in the branch; and sometimes I would be rinsing it and Mis?

tress would call me, and I would be so scared I would put it on wet and

run to her. I had a time, I tell you; they might nigh eat me up when I was

staying there, and I was so glad to be clean" (p. 270). It was not impor? tant to many owners that slaves were groomed. Indeed, grooming was

one ofthe indicators that a slave had a privileged status. For the slaves

treated as pets, cleanliness was emphasized. Lucy remembered, "We had

to [be] always nice and clean and everything" (p. 28). Elsewhere slave

children were seen as stock animals, not in need of special grooming.

Certainly, no one took time to help the slave child make his or her hair

attractive, because parents had little time and owners understood this

lack of grooming as one of the many ways slave children learned their

slave role.

It is obvious that slave children's sexuality was developing as they be?

came more concerned with dress, dance, and courting relationships. De?

spite practices occurring in slavery, there is evidence of ego strength and

identity formation. Margaret Lawrence has suggested that it is with tur-

moil that ego strength is tested. Slaves remained individuals despite their owners' efforts to depersonalize them, and only through being in?

dividuals could they develop identity. Even among slave children there

was a range of experiences and level of acceptance. They were presented with many barriers to the development of a sense of identity. What it

meant to become a man or a woman was compounded by the times and

the condition of servitude. However tragic and noxious the events re?

called, it should be observed that most ofthe former slaves did go on to

be productive men and women.57 Leonard Shengold notes that he has

57In her work with poor inner-city families in Harlem, Margaret Lawrence found that, despite obstacles, children in these families have the same developmental tasks to perform as any other children. Each child is affected by nature, nurture, and noxia, according to Lawrence. Nature is described as the constitutional makeup influenced by genetics. Nur? ture is the care or love the child receives from a parent or parental figure. Lawrence de-

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400 Anthony S. Parent, Jr., and Susan Brown Wallace

treated people who were able to survive their attempted childhood soul

murder with considerable intactness and psychic strength; many other

people with similar experience are often devastated by the experience or

are unmotivated for a variety of reasons to seek treatment. A number of

those untreated persons grow up to be soul murderers themselves.

Shengold, however, suggests that in spite of and sometimes because of

traumatic early experiences, some individuals are able to make impor? tant contributions to their cultures.58

Although there were slaves whose souls were murdered, there is evi?

dence that most sought to develop their own identities. In doing so they

passed through epigenetic stages of development. Despite the separa? tion and betrayal that occurred in the first stage of "trust versus mis-

trust" in infancy and childhood, many slave children went on to develop a sense of trust. There is evidence in the narrative that some ofthe slaves

genuinely cared for each other and sometimes for whites and did not de?

velop pervasive mistrust. Erikson felt distrust occurred if this first-stage crisis was not resolved. The ritual degradations of slavery made the sec?

ond stage, "autonomy versus shame and doubt," a difficult period for

slave children. Despite many efforts to shame the children because of

their slave status, their lack of manners and education, their "black-

ness," their association as chattel, or their alleged inferiority, many were

able to develop a sense of autonomy and were freed of the pervasive shame and doubt that would occur if Erikson's second stage was not

successfully negotiated. Indeed slave children learned modesty and de?

cency despite being stripped and being made to live without underwear.

Many developed strong religious commitments, in part related to the

degrading practices that occurred. The third stage of "initiative versus

guilt" was fraught with peril for many slave children. Erikson felt that as

the child gave up fantasies, he might suppress an inner "powerhouse of

rage."59 In slavery, desire to develop individual thought and initiative

was usually thwarted or discouraged. Few slave children were able to

pursue goals with confidence, without fear of punishment. Many were

scribes noxia as trauma or severe injury, either physical or mental. She goes on to say that

despite trauma, many of the poor, primarily black, children in Harlem and elsewhere sur- vive and do well. "Nature, nurture, and noxia do not exist alone in Harlem. They are inter-

twined, interlarded, soaked through and through, and mixed with strength, ego strength. Strength abounds in Harlem. Three hundred years of oppression and it survives. . . . Even

anger may show strength. It can sustain a child and protect him until he is helped to find more suitable vehicles for his ability to love and to act" (Margaret M. Lawrence, Young Inner-City Families: Development of Ego Strength under Stress [New York, 1975], p. 35).

58Shengold, p. 7. 59Erikson, Childhood and Society, p. 257.

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Childhood and Sexual Identity under Slavery 401

forced into work that was done for their owners' profit, with little regard for their individual sense of accomplishment. Even then productive work was undervalued. Evidence of rage exists in the narratives. During this stage the children became painfully aware that they were slaves.

In the next stage of identity development, "industry versus inferior?

ity," the latency-age child developed a sense of competence in his ability to perform both physically and intellectually?if the initiative stage was

not completed earlier, industry could not be properly developed. Be?

cause so many negative identity issues are referenced in the narratives, it

seems that many slave children developed a sense of inferiority as op-

posed to competence. The next stage, according to Erikson, brought concerns of "identity versus role confusion." Here a desire for unique- ness and wholeness as a valued individual brought with it a sense of

fidelity to others, which resulted from and strengthened a sense of iden?

tity. Despite insecurity in family life, individuals were faithful to their

families and to individuals that they cared about. These informants also

had a major adjustment to make in childhood or early adulthood, from

slave to freedperson. This is a unique situation common to few individ?

uals and cultures. Deprived of decency, modesty, religion, consistent re?

lationships, and sexual rights, many of these slaves developed a keen

sense of morality. Their sexuality was often exploited because of its ad-

vantage to the slaveowner. The sense of extended family (not always re?

lated to biological heritage) existed in slavery because of the harsh

conditions of permanent and temporary separation. This sense of family was in rare cases extended to whites who the slaves felt had been impor? tant to them. The destruction of slavery would afford a collective cathar-

sis, a healthy resolution, a redemption, for the ex-slaves, but it offered

no comparable resolution to the former owners. Gutman writes: "Nei?

ther the coming of the Union Army nor the general emancipation al-

tered the sexual beliefs of southern ex-slaves, southern whites, and

northern whites. But the social upheaval associated with the war and the

emancipation allowed ex-slaves to act upon their beliefs in a changed

setting and even?for some?to try to reverse sexual and social prac? tices that violated prevalent slave moral and social norms. The task

proved difficult."60 As a people the bond of family and cultural values

may have compensated for the travail of slavery, but as individuals noth?

ing could compensate for the wrong childhood.

60Gutman, pp. 385-86.

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