On August 3, 1882, Honorata, a twelve-year-old enslaved girl, was purchased by Henriques Ferreira Pontes in Olinda, in the northeast state of Pernambuco in Brazil.
Before bringing her to his house, Pontes took her to the place where Tiburcio, an enslaved man also owned by him, resided. Asking the bondsman to leave his residence, Pontes locked himself in his room and raped Honorata, who was a virgin.1 Honorata’s ordeal was not an exception, and her tragic story survived in the written record only because in 1882, slavery existed only in Cuba and Brazil.
Therefore, publicity of the case was greatly influenced by the intensive abolitionist movement that was finally shaking Brazil.In all societies where slavery existed in the Americas, slaveholders maintained coerced sexual relations with their human property. Not just slave owners but overseers as well subjected enslaved women and men to sexual abuse. In the domestic environment, enslaved maids and wet nurses lived under the continuous control of their owners. Sexual abuse often began in childhood, sometimes under the slave owner’s promise of release from enslavement. Slave owners and overseers conceived the bodies of enslaved people as property and therefore available to them. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Jesuit priests such as Antonil wrote about the abuses perpetrated by the overseers against enslaved women in Brazil. According to him, they inflicted physical punishments on bondswomen who refused to engage in sexual relations. These accounts of violence contrast sharply with the widespread image that until recently prevailed in Brazil and Latin American societies disseminated sometimes in European travel accounts but especially through the work of early scholars such as Gilberto Freyre, which advanced the misleading idea that enslaved women maintained harmonious and consensual sexual relations with slaveholders.2
People engage in sexual activities for many reasons, often in search of pleasure but also in response to social and religious demands from their communities. Bondspeople engaged in sexual exchanges with other bondspeople, freed persons, free people, and white individuals of various social positions.
They also sometimes had sex with their owners. Needless to say, these relations were tainted by inherent imbalance of power, coercion, exploitation, and violence. For enslaved men, women, and children, the possibility of experiencing sexual abuse began when they were captured and gathered by force into coffles, then confined in coastal structures along Atlantic African shores. This potential for abuse continued in the holds of slave ships, and, once in the Americas, sexual violence haunted all activities involving enslaved people and their owners, overseers, and other free white individuals.As this chapter will show, sex under slavery was shaped by relations of power and physical violence. Several slave narratives published in Britain and the United States reported that slave owners could claim the bodies of enslaved women to provide sexual services whenever they wanted. Indeed, in urban settings as well as on plantations located in remote rural areas, enslaved women were constantly exposed to sexual violence. Bondsmen were also victims of sexual abuse by their male and female owners. Regardless of racial ideologies that emerged during the era of slavery, bondswomen lived in constant threat of being raped by slave owners, other male members of the household, and overseers. By examining the problem of sex and slavery, this chapter argues that despite the existence of relations based on bondspeople’s own choices documented in written documents such as wills, postmortem inventories, and marriage records, sexual violence against enslaved women and men was widespread throughout slave societies and societies with slavery in the Americas.