Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies

Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Diana Paton, Emily West, Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Pereira Toledo Machado, Diana Paton, Emily West

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367202026
• eBook ISBN: 9780429535802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book provides critical perspectives on the multiple forms of 'mothering' that took place in Atlantic slave societies. Facing repeated child death, mothering was a site of trauma and grief for many, even as slaveholders romanticized enslaved women's work in caring for slaveholders' children.

Examining a wide range of societies including medieval Spain, Brazil, and New England, and including the work of historians based in Brazil, Cuba, the United States, and Britain, this collection breaks new ground in demonstrating the importance of mothering for the perpetuation of slavery, and the complexity of the experience of motherhood in such circumstances.

This pathbreaking collection, on all aspects of the experience, politics, and representations of motherhood under Atlantic slavery, analyses societies across the Atlantic world, and will be of interest to those studying the history of slavery as well as those studying mothering throughout history. This book comprises two special issues, originally published in Slavery & Abolition and Women's History Review.

The nameless and the forgotten: maternal grief, sacred protection, and the archive of slavery

Sasha Turner

ABSTRACT

Death, particularly of enslaved infants and children, cast a long shadow over the experiences of enslaved mothers. Almost half of all enslaved infants died within the first two weeks of birth and another quarter died by age two. Although profit–loss calculations tabulate the frequent deaths of enslaved youngsters, these accounts reveal very little about cultural conventions on maternal grief or how enslaved mothers responded to their children’s deaths. In addition to using the rhetorical to draw attention to the loss women experienced and archival silences on maternal grief, this article challenges the claims that enslaved Africans welcomed and celebrated death because it freed loved ones from bondage and reunited captive Africans with their ancestors. Attention to expressions of grief and evolving grieving practices reveal the transformation of enslaved people’s culture and the invisible suffering of the enslaved, which are sometimes overshadowed by narratives of resistance and the resilience of African culture and black mothers.

What kinds of stories do we write about the ‘nameless and the forgotten’? How do we compute loss, when the depth of the ‘loss cannot be known’?¹

‘18 December 1780 Last night Abba Miscarried of a boy.’ ‘Mary Ann was delivered of twins both died.’ ‘Rosetta’s child not named dead.’ ‘Children don’t thrive well here, the reason is a mystery to me, but I am really sorry for they generally die of the jaw fall, or some other disorder when about a week or fortnight old.’²

Enslaved mothers and their children enter the archives in little more than fragments. Snippets of their lives, loves, and losses emerge from records imputed with the possibility of yielding profits. Miscarriages and deaths record financial loss. What of a mother’s grief? How did they grieve their children’s death? The calculus of partus sequitur ventrem – children follow their mother’s status – quantified and commodified but obfuscated and destroyed. Ideologies of motherhood. Mothers’ love and grief. Communal support and the dead remembered.

Absent from the archives are enslaved women’s feelings about childbearing, and how the specter of death that hovered over the womb shaped women’s maternal desires and practices. Understandably, historians speculate that childbearing brought anxiety and trepidation, a humming disquiet. Defining childbirth as ‘rooted in loss,’ Jennifer Morgan, for instance, explains that mothering under enslavement was ‘marked by an enormous degree of uncertainty that was manifested in the bodies of children whose future was out of [mothers’] control.’ Slavery’s violent, vexing, and violating assaults meant that ‘the birth of a child would have done nothing to alleviate sorrow; indeed it would only have made the load heavier.’³ Morgan’s conclusion is the culmination of several decades of scholarship, which beginning in the 1940s contends that women controlled their fertility because bearing children endangered the emotional life of mothers and their community. Fertility control, Herbert Aptheker wrote in 1943, ‘shorten[ed women’s] own misery and hurt their oppressors.’⁴ Women therefore kept sexual distance to prevent unwanted pregnancies, as well as turned the violence endemic to slavery inward toward their own bodies and that of their children by slitting the throats of their sons and daughters or using vaginal suppositories and emmenagogues to prevent conception and expel fetuses.⁵

‘Gynecological revolt.’ ‘Self-mutilation.’ ‘Self-sacrificing.’ Saidiya Hartman is right. Slavery’s ‘investment in violence’ inundates not only the archives, but also the narratives scholars weave.⁶ Historians of slavery have rightly insisted on fertility control as an act of defiance against sexual exploitation and the capital claims slaveholders made on women’s reproductive ability. Risking overstressing black women’s extraordinary strength, scholars are equally right in spotlighting stories of ferocious mother-warriors ‘who shouldered weapons while nursing babies.’⁷ These narratives elucidate how enslaved mothers performed the exceedingly difficult task of mothering under slavery but with the result of obfuscating failure, rejection, grief, fear, and loss.⁸ Where does women’s disinterest in mothering fit? How did such young women as Harriet Jacobs reckon with the admonition of grandmothers to ‘stand by [their] own children, and suffer with them till death [because] nobody respects a mother who forsakes her children; and if you leave them, you will never be happy a moment … and your suffering will be dreadful[?]’⁹ Did women need consoling after aborting their babies? Did women and community members celebrate infanticide as ‘heroic tragedies’ where, despite loss, death secured a passage to freedom?¹⁰

All too often, narratives of motherhood among enslaved women are frozen in a ‘heroic pose,’ and the quest to capture the s/hero’s ‘unbending defiance’ sidelines the complexities and vulnerabilities of enslaved subjects.¹¹ Stories of enslaved mothers’ negative emotional responses to sacrificing the self for the sake of children can destabilize the mother-worker-warrior image cultivated in the literature.¹² Yet it is not necessary to dismantle the image of the devoted mother. Extricating the anguish and failures childbearing women felt, whether and how maternal grief was expressed in enslaved women’s communities, for example, is necessary to understand how being enslaved shaped the experience, expression, and suppression of emotions. Delving into enslaved women’s emotional lives not only peels away another layer in understanding slavery as more than just corporal exhibitions of violence. The cost of slavery to black humanity was also manifested in invisible scars.

Scholarship on the nostalgia experienced by Middle Passage survivors, for example, has emphasized the link between the social and the psychic as necessary for fully apprehending the ‘affective experience’ of uprooting and displacement wrought by the transatlantic slave trade. The nostalgia, or ‘sad mood originating from a desire to return to one’s native land’ captive Africans experienced, argued Ramesh Mallipeddi, was both an unconscious consequence of forced migration and a self-imposed condition brought on by enslaved people seeking to reclaim ‘some measure of self-possession.’ Nostalgia, which manifested in various forms as ‘dejection, sullenness, withdrawal, and a propensity to suicide,’ empowered captive Africans to annihilate the body through the mind.¹³ Grief as examined in this discussion similarly emphasizes an in/voluntary suffering the death of children evoked; distinct from grievance as ‘speaking out against that injury’ or pressing a social claim based on such injury.¹⁴ By focusing on the varying ways grief manifested (versus grievance), this essay brings attention to the ‘intangible’ suffering enslaved women experienced.

An archive that transformed people into marketable commodities restrains what is recoverable of the intimate lives of the commodified. Even when enslaved women had some opportunity to disclose their innermost pain, to abolitionists, for example, who were interested in exposing the viciousness of slavery, enslaved women appear to have ‘adhered to a cult of secrecy, a culture of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives.’¹⁵ Such enslaved women as Mary Prince who narrated her life to abolitionists gave the ‘appearance of disclosure, or openness about [herself] and [her] feelings’ but she concealed the deepest parts of herself: pleasure, motherhood, sexuality remain an ‘enigma.’¹⁶ Yet it is ‘possible to exceed … the constitutive limits of the archive,’ by exploiting what Hartman suggests are the capacities of the subjunctive and the rhetorical to tell stories through questioning, expressing ‘doubts, wishes, and possibilities.’¹⁷ This article engages with archival fragments using a rhetorical strategy to tell a story of mothers’ fear, grief, and apprehension while calling attention to the challenges of such narration. Utilizing this ‘two fold attention’ to use Lisa Lowe’s framing, allows an affirmation of what is possible historically while apprehending what is lost and irrecoverable in the archives.¹⁸

Death, writes Vincent Brown ‘was at the center of social experience for everyone’ in Jamaica throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.¹⁹ Neither blacks nor whites sustained their populations by natural increase. While the mortality rates for whites were considerably higher than blacks, death was more visible among black inhabitants because of the preponderance of enslaved people. The high infant and child mortality rates not only entrenched the plantations’ dependence on the slave trade. That more than one-half of enslaved newborns perished within days of their birth, and another one-quarter died before they reached aged two, also shaped the emotional quality of enslaved parents’ lives. Disease, malnutrition, brutal punishment, unsanitary living and working conditions, and an excessive work regime pushed the enslaved beyond the limits of human endurance. While peculiar factors combined to shape the experience of death among enslaved Africans, mortal loss, particularly of children, was common for all inhabitants of the New World.²⁰ Similarly high death rates among children of colonists in North America, for example, resulted in parents, with the encouragement of spiritual leaders, maintaining ‘due distance’ from their children. By limiting affection and attachment, parents could fortify their ‘minds against the worst that might happen.’²¹

Did enslaved mothers similarly insulate themselves; perhaps doubly so knowing that social if not physical death awaited their children?²² There is evidence to suggest that some enslaved mothers responded to their children’s injuries and needs with passivity. On Lord Penrhyn estate, one woman merely described as ‘one of the Congo Negroes’ reportedly caused the death of her child by her inattentiveness. The child died when it fell from its mother’s arms, after one too many episodes of the mother loosely holding it.²³ Other mothers abandoned their children. On Golden Grove estate, the enslaved girl Mar was placed in the care of another woman after her mother ran away.²⁴ Having only a notation in the slave inventories to go on, we do not know how long after Mar’s birth her mother ran. At the very least, ignoring and abandoning children shielded mothers from the vulnerability of the almost inevitable death of their children.

Scholars writing of the Caribbean slavery experience offer the ‘demoralized slave’ as a trope for explaining apparent passivity among the enslaved. Writing of one enslaved woman named Sally, Trevor Burnard described Sally as ‘so traumatized by slavery that she gave up.’ Sally had no children, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Mothers, masters and the state: motherhood and reproduction under slavery and freedom
• Part II: Enslaved women and the care of slaveholders’ children
• Part III: Sexuality, respectability, and violence
• Part IV: The geographies of motherhood
• Part V: Slavery and the medicalisation of childbirth
• Part VI: Mothering in the era of emancipation
• Index