Before being captured, forced into slavery, and transported to the Americas, many bondswomen experienced motherhood.

Some women and their children were captured and separated during wars and raids when they were still on African shores. Others were caught and transported together to the African coasts, only to be separated at various stages of the Atlantic slave trade, as discussed in chapter 3.

Figure 12.1. Diagram of La Marie-Séraphique. Photograph by René Lhermitte. Courtesy of Musée d’histoire de Nantes (Nantes History Museum), Nantes, France.

The permanent exhibition of the Nantes History Museum housed in the Château des Ducs de Bretagne in Nantes, France’s largest slave-trading port, features an astonishing watercolor including four diagrams representing the French slave ship La Marie-SĂ©raphique. The watercolor (figure 12.1), probably executed by the ship captain Jean-Baptiste Fautrel-Gaugy and the officer Jean-RenĂ© L’Hermite, offers detailed views of the slave vessel that sailed first from Nantes to the Loango coast in West Central Africa and then transported 307 enslaved Africans to Cap Français in 1769.² But a close-up view on the upper left side of the representation of the overcrowded lower deck (figure 12.2) reveals the image of one enslaved woman suckling her baby.³

Figure 12.2.

We do not know if this is a depiction of an enslaved mother who was actually on board La Marie-SĂ©raphique, as the image could also have been created to make a general reference to the occasional presence of breastfeeding mothers among the human cargo of slave ships. Eighteenth-century agents in West African trading posts such as Pierre Simon Gourg, one of the directors of the French fort in Ouidah in the late eighteenth century, reported that European traders avoided purchasing pregnant women or women who had just given birth “on the grounds that they are in the way and make a mess on board.” According to Gourg, African agents who knew they could “sell women who have just given birth if they present the child always take it away and threaten the mother with killing her if she says she has any and as soon as the mother is sold, if the child is not weaned or if they have no nurse to give the baby they throw him in the fields” to become “food for tigers, wolves and snakes.” The French officer still insisted that “this is not a fiction, it is a known fact to all who come to the coast.”⁴ But La Marie-SĂ©raphique’s detailed rendering suggests that this breastfeeding mother might have been more than just a product of its creators’ imagination. There are no words to describe the ordeal of enslaved mothers on board slave ships. The Atlantic crossing from the Loango coast to Saint-Domingue lasted approximately sixty days. More than two days of dehydration compromised the mother’s ability to nurse a baby, which also explains the higher levels of mortality among infants during the Middle Passage.

The image of a bondswoman nursing a baby in a floating tomb is one that juxtaposes the certainty of death with the strength of life. Drawing from this powerful representation of African women’s resilience during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, this chapter shows that giving birth and raising enslaved children added further layers of violence to the lives of bondswomen.

In response, bondswomen in Brazil, the United States, and the West Indies resisted reproduction as much as they could by using plants to induce abortions and by practicing infanticide.⁷ Throughout their lives, captive mothers faced the tragic and enduring dilemma of reconciling the love for their sons and daughters with the fact that these same children were the property of the men and women who kept them in bondage. Throughout the Americas, but especially in Brazil, slave owners purchased enslaved mothers to breastfeed their newborns, forcing them to neglect their own progeny. Only with the rise of the abolitionist movement and the enactment of legislation gradually abolishing slavery in the Americas was the conundrum created by the principle of partus sequitur ventrem slowly dismantled. Drawing from these themes, this chapter examines how enslaved women responded to the challenges of motherhood.