An Intimate Economy

Enslaved Women, Work, and America's Domestic Slave Trade

Alexandra J. Finley

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469655123
• Categoría: Social Sciences
• Categoría: African American Studies

Alexandra Finley adds crucial new dimensions to the boisterous debate over the relationship between slavery and capitalism by placing women's labor at the center of the antebellum slave trade, focusing particularly on slave traders' ability to profit from enslaved women's domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor. The slave market infiltrated every aspect of southern society, including the most personal spaces of the household, the body, and the self. Finley shows how women's work was necessary to the functioning of the slave trade, and thus to the spread of slavery to the Lower South, the expansion of cotton production, and the profits accompanying both of these markets. Through the personal histories of four enslaved women, Finley explores the intangible costs of the slave market, moving beyond ledgers, bills of sales, and statements of profit and loss to consider the often incalculable but nevertheless invaluable place of women's emotional, sexual, and domestic labor in the economy. The details of these women's lives reveal the complex intersections of economy, race, and family at the heart of antebellum society.

CHAPTER ONE

Fancy

Silas Omohundro Market and General Account Book

Library of Virginia

8 January 1858

1 pair Earrings for Girl Jane & stockings 2.50

9 June 1860

Cash to Corinna for Market 50.00

23 December 1862

Dimont [sic] Ring Give to Corinna 100.00

Sometime after she was born in 1835, Silas Omohundro purchased Corinna Hinton, and potentially her mother, as well. After he started recording purchases in his market and general account book in January of 1855, Omohundro regularly noted purchases he made for Hinton and items he had her purchase on his behalf. In July 1855 he gave her cash to buy clothes for his children. In November he went to Binford, Mayo, & Blair to select three dresses for Hinton. In 1856 he paid for her to have her “likeness” taken. Over the course of the next six months, Omohundro bought Hinton four more dresses. In 1857 he paid Doctor Hudson to make Hinton a set of false teeth. He had her watch repaired later that year. In 1859 and 1860, Omohundro paid for more dresses, corsets, shoes, a mourning veil, silverware, and fabric. The list goes on—silk stockings, buckskin slippers, garters, bonnets, tea sets, jewelry—with entry after entry of material goods that a slave trader purchased for a woman he enslaved.¹

Then there are entries for work Hinton performed, as well as work others did for her. Early in the account book, Omohundro paid Hinton “for negro clothing.” These entries occurred annually or semiannually until 1863. Even more frequently, Omohundro paid Hinton to “make market.” In 1855 he gave her money to buy fruit “for pickles and preserves.” In 1856 Omohundro paid her for “making childrens cloth[es].” In 1858 Omohundro paid Mrs. Brown, a midwife, to attend to Hinton in the birth of her fifth child, who was stillborn. A few days later, Omohundro paid for the child’s burial, and then for Mrs. Brown to return to visit Hinton. In 1862 Omohundro gave money for Hinton to purchase cornmeal, brandy, a sausage grinder, and other kitchen items. In 1863 he paid a woman named Caroline to do Corinna’s washing. In 1864 Omohundro paid Mrs. Murphy for nursing Corinna’s infant child.²

What are we to make of these purchases—the fancy goods, the mundane necessities of life, the intimate and emotional labor of other women? In certain moments, Omohundro’s purchases seem to reinforce popular, stereotypical representations of concubines: the expensive jewelry, the multitude of fashionable clothing and accessories, and the household finery. At other times Omohundro’s cash outlays reveal the work required of a concubine: the household management, the childcare, and the emotional toll of such reproductive and sexual labor. Either way, all of Omohundro’s purchases survive in the archive and reach us through his penmanship, his paper, and his perspective. Before Omohundro’s death, Corinna Hinton’s voice doesn’t survive in a single record. Even after his death, her surviving words are sparse and mostly filtered through lawyers and government officials.

What does it mean that Corinna’s story survives because of Omohundro’s purchases—the purchase of her body and labor, the purchases for her, and the purchases she made with Omohundro’s money? How can we read past Omohundro’s rote notations of commodities for cash to understand what the same purchases meant for Hinton? What did it mean to Hinton to put on kid gloves, a diamond ring, and silk stockings before going to the shops of Richmond to buy fabric and ready-made clothes for herself, her children, and the men and women whom the father of her children enslaved and sold? How did Hinton understand her labor in Omohundro’s kitchen, as she pickled and preserved fruit, baked bread, and dispensed rum to visiting slave traders? What did it mean for her to serve tea in her tea set in the house next to the slave jail? How did Hinton process the death of her stillborn child?

None of these questions are easy to answer, as details of Hinton’s life appear only through her encounters with Omohundro and, later, the court system. Yet this lack of immediate evidence directly from Hinton’s hand should not preclude attempts to understand her life on its own terms, as well as the lives of those like her. Women such as Corinna Hinton are too often viewed only from the perspective of the men who enslaved, commodified, and sexualized them. The archive is full of examples of white men who fulfilled their own fantasies of power through attempts to dominate black women’s bodies. While it is important to document and analyze what ownership and mastery meant for these men, it is equally important to entertain the same situations from the women’s perspective. Failure to do so too often results in statements such as “many of these fancy girls … often ended by falling in love with their men, and vice versa.” What evidence exists that “fancy girls” loved the men who enslaved them, outside of gendered assumptions that time, children, and financial support must translate into love?³

This is an attempt to tell Corinna Hinton’s story without recommodifying her person. There is no evidence that Hinton would have understood herself as a “fancy girl.” Indeed, being categorized into a representative, marketable “type” was a form of violence itself. While there is no doubt that white men commodified and sexualized enslaved women’s bodies in the slave market, it is worth asking what the experience of the slave market, and labor within it, meant to enslaved women, and to understand them, to the best of our ability, as individual women rather than as an undifferentiated group of bodies onto whom white men projected their fantasies. Though categorized by slave traders and potentially others around her as a “fancy,” Corinna Hinton lived and labored both within and outside of this label. Light-skinned and enslaved, Hinton had to navigate a world that restricted the possibilities of her life by putting a price on her racialized and sexualized body, but her sense of self—her soul value—could not be defined by the moniker “fancy.” What follows is an experiment in interpreting the life of Corinna Hinton both inside and outside of the market in her many overlapping and entangled identities.⁴

8 January 1858: 1 pair Earrings for Girl Jane & stockings 2.50

In order to understand the experiences of enslaved women who were sold for their sexual availability, it is necessary to first define and then deconstruct the identity slave traders tried to place on them. What was a “fancy” to a slave trader, and why was she so valuable? Nearly all slave traders, including Omohundro, described some of their “stock” as “fancy.” Just as traders noted the going prices for “prime male field hands,” they also created the type of the “fancy girl.” With this designation, slave traders erased individual identities and replaced them with an ideal form. To mark a woman a “fancy girl” was to disregard her bodily integrity and personal sanctity, to deem her a marketable commodity available for sex and white male pleasure. This designation could be either implicit or explicit—conveyed directly in language or indirectly through visual markers, euphemisms, and innuendo.

The term “fancy” suggests extravagance, indulgence, and lust. Webster’s 1841 dictionary defined “fancy” as, first, “the faculty by which the mind forms an image or a representation of anything perceived before; the power of combining and modifying such objects into new pictures or images; the power of readily and happily creating and recalling such objects for the purpose of amusement, wit, or embellishment; imagination,” but also as “taste,” “inclination,” “love,” “false notion,” and, significantly, “something that pleases or entertains without real use or value.” According to slang dictionaries, “fancy” could also mean “the favourite sports, pets, or pastimes of a person” and, interestingly, “the paramour of a prostitute is still called her fancy-man,” or “a fellow kept by a prostitute.” Finally, “fancy pieces” were “women of pleasure, doxies, &c.”⁵

Nineteenth-century Americans used “fancy” in a number of contexts. A “fancy ball” was “a ball in which persons appear in fancy dresses in imitation of the costumes of different persons and nations.” A “fancy store” was one that sold showy, ornamental objects and other “fancy goods” that were “in distinction from those of a simple or plain color or make.” A “fancy stock,” meanwhile, was “a species of stocks which afford great opportunity for stock gambling, since they have no intrinsic value, and the fluctuations in their prices are artificial.” To the buyers and sellers of “fancy girls” or “fancy maids,” then, these were women who were expensive, ornamental, and rare. They showed off a man’s wealth and good taste but were of little true value. “Fancy” referenced the gamble and thrill of purchasing such a woman; the “fancy girl” was, to her purchaser, the embodiment of all those “images” of the mind, a combination of the presumed sexual availability of black women with the privileging of white skin in a pretty “imitation” of a white woman who could be “readily and happily” recalled—and then discarded—“for the purpose of amusement” with little thought to the woman herself.⁶

Particularly when communicating with one another, slave traders could be quite candid about the value they placed on a “fancy,” and slave traders’ letters are inundated with the casual violence of the term. John J. Toler, a trader who moved between the Richmond and New Orleans market, reported to his colleagues on one occasion, “Mr. D[ickinson] & Hill sold a no 1 Fancy the other day for $1300,” and later noted, “Mr. H[ector] D[avis] sold a brown skin fancy to day for $1600 and a litler [sic] one with a child that said she was a seamstris [sic] for $1500.” And then again, in the same month, Toler wrote, “they [sic] were three Fances [sic] sold yesterday at thes [sic] figures namely $1550 dollars $1680 dollars & $1650 dollars.” Another trader who frequented the Richmond market, Philip Thomas, used similar language to write to his associate, noting, “I bought … [a] 13 year old Girl Bright Colour nearly a fancy for $1135 she can be sold for $1325. Zach bought a Fancy at $1325.” Thomas wrote the word “Fancy” in bold, oversized letters so that it jumped out from the page at the reader.⁷

Calculated marketing and desire for profit motivated slave traders and drew them to enslaved women whose sexuality they could exploit. Confident they could profit from their customers’ sexual fantasies and dreams of mastery, traders saw “fancies” as a solid investment. Philip Thomas wistfully wrote his business partner, “I wish all we had were Eliza & Mariahs,” referring to two “fancy” women he had purchased. Thomas was sure that “fancies” guaranteed high profits, so he was incensed when his agent, Calhoun, sold Eliza “low,” writing, “Tell Calhoun I shall give him fits when I see him for selling Eliza as low as $1200 She was worth at least $2000.” Thomas planned to capitalize on Eliza’s sexuality, and Calhoun had not followed his employer’s orders. Richmond auctioneers D. M. Pulliam & Co. similarly tried to lure traders in by promising, “Fancy girls would sell exceedingly well just now.” Pulliam followed this statement with an enticing, “Hoping we hear from you soon.”⁸

While slave traders rarely made explicit what constituted a “fancy,” they could be pressed to do so, especially in court. In May of 1847, Louisianan Mansuel White initiated a legal suit against Hope H. Slatter, a slave trader based out of Baltimore. White had given a man named Buckner H. Payne money to purchase a slave from Slatter’s agent in New Orleans, James Blakeley. Payne told Blakeley he wanted “a nurse for his family” and selected a fourteen-year-old “mulattress slave” named Mary Ellen Brooks. Payne said he was going to take Brooks to see his wife and a physician before purchasing her. Soon after, Payne purchased Brooks, but within a month the enslaved woman was dead.

The legal case surrounding Brooks’s death at first flirted with and then made explicit the sexual violence inherent in her sale. Both parties to the case called multiple witnesses to attest to Brooks’s health at the time of her sale, as well as the price they assigned to her. Witness after witness used similar, vague language in reference to the “type” of enslaved woman Brooks was. Slave trader Frances Jump claimed he “gave her a mattress to sleep on, as usual with house servants. She was pretty and intelligent, and well suited for a house servant.” C. M. Rutherford testified that “there are cases where girls of that description would command a higher price.” S. F. Slatter, Hope Slatter’s son, allegedly called her “a small, delicate thing,” while Blakeley described her as “a very pretty girl, a bright mulatto with long curly hair and fine features—she was about fourteen years old.” A doctor hired to do a postmortem examination described her as a “yellow girl.” Delicate, pretty, bright, intelligent, yellow, house servant, mulatto, fine—this was the language of the “fancy trade.”⁹

Part of Blakeley and Slatter’s defense was to impugn Payne’s motives. Their attorneys repeatedly asked questions about Payne’s marital status at the time of Brooks’s purchase, and whether or not his wife was in New Orleans with him. One of the questions the defense asked witnesses was “Is Mr. B. H. Payne a man of family …?” When witnesses confirmed that Payne was married, Blakeley eventually became more explicit in his accusations, saying, “Ellen Brooks was a fancy girl.” Someone in the room must have asked what Blakeley meant by fancy, because the minutes next note, “witness means by that a young, handsome yellow girl of fourteen or fifteen with long curly hair.” Shortly after his revelation, Blakeley asserted that Payne actually had “no wife at the place where he lived,” thereby implying that when Payne took Brooks to show his wife, he was actually raping her. Blakeley continued, “The death of the girl had been hurried by improper intercourse between him and said girl and that he had been informed by the girl.”¹⁰

The focus of the extant minutes quickly moved on from this reference to “improper intercourse,” but the language Blakeley used merits examination. While he us...