Forced Reproduction
Sex continued to be linked to violence in the daily experiences of enslaved people in the Americas. Slave dealers sold women and men to perform a variety of tasks in cities, mines, and plantations.
As discussed in chapter 6, buyers and sellers scrutinized, smelled, and touched the seminaked bodies of human commodities displayed in slave markets. This forced intimacy was a concrete form of violation. Slavers selected enslaved persons to perform a variety of activities, but physical strength and attractiveness were essential features that led them to purchase specific men and women and favor them over others. Slave traders knew the preferences of slave buyers who sought to purchase attractive enslaved women to become their sexual partners.43 Regardless of age and sex, bondspeople were expected to provide sexual services to their owners and to whomever their owner chose for them.For slave owners and slave dealers, the sexuality of their enslaved property was linked to their capacity for reproduction. Some slave owners also coerced enslaved people to engage in sexual activity as well. The practice of forced reproduction of bondspeople is documented in the Iberian Peninsula as early as in the sixteenth century and in colonial North America as early as the seventeenth century.44 With the ban of the Atlantic slave trade to the United States in 1808 and the rise of cotton production in the United States in the early nineteenth century, some slave owners started forcing enslaved men and women to engage in sexual intercourse with the hope of increasing the size of the enslaved population.45 Historian Daina Ramey Berry defined compulsory breeding among enslaved people as “third party rape.” She reminds us not only that “rape and breeding are unified by the use of force—both physical and mental” but also that “slave breeding represented one form of sexual abuse that adopted the machinations and mannerisms of rape because it forced people to engage in unsolicited sexual activity.”46 Freedpeople and their descendants remembered forced reproduction with words associated with animal husbandry that compared bondspeople to mules and cows.
As one historian reminds us, these analogies, largely employed in narratives by freedmen and freedwomen collected as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers Project in the United States in the 1930s, underscored the “inhumanity of this practice.”47As the trade in enslaved Africans to Brazil continued until the 1850s, the country never witnessed the same birthrate levels as the United States. Surviving written records rarely document forced breeding in Brazil, but similarly to the United States during the twentieth century, journalists and historians collected testimonies by freedpeople and their descendants who reported the use of enslaved men as breeders in Brazilian plantations. For example, Roque JosĂ© Florêncio (1827–1958), known as “Pata Seca,” was an enslaved breeder in the coffee plantation Santa EudĂłxia near São Carlos in the state of São Paulo in Brazil.48 Oral tradition among Florêncio’s descendants emphasizes his role as an enslaved breeder who fathered 249 children, though only nine of them were conceived by his wife.
Florêncio’s story is not the only surviving account about enslaved breeders in southeast Brazil during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the trade in enslaved Africans was prohibited and the coffee industry blooming. Another former Brazilian enslaved man provided testimony that included telling details about his role as a breeder in a southeast coffee plantation in Brazil. In 1973, João Antônio de Guaraciaba, by that time reportedly 122 years old, told the journalist Jorge Andrade his mistress would bring him to the slave quarters and separate a “herd” of ten enslaved women. Some of them were as young as fifteen years old and were all in their fertile period. Guaraciaba told the journalist that to perform his work of breeder, he was well fed, with the same diet as his owner, which included beef, milk, and rice. Some bondswomen cried and resisted, but as he had one month to impregnate the women, he was able to convince them to have sex by offering them affection and sharing his food.
According to him, “if a woman is at the �moment’ she becomes fiery, stepping on fire. Women are like sow, cow, mare. At her �moment,’ she delivers herself. Ugly or old, any male will do.”49 Guaraciaba’s account, bragging about his manhood and evacuating the violence involved in forced breeding, is probably exaggerated, leading some historians to approach similar accounts with caution, very often labeling them as the product of collective memory passed down from generation to generation and not as reliable oral historical accounts.50 But in the context of the second slavery and the final thirty years of slavery in Brazil, it is plausible that such a figure could have existed as recounted in Guaraciaba’s telling.Like the accounts of the Middle Passage, written records are often silent about sexual violence against enslaved men, women, and children. These gaps are not surprising, as these documents were written by white male officers who officially corroborated the views of elites who endorsed the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as legitimate, even after they became illegal. Indeed, almost everywhere in the Americas the silence of archival documents regarding sexual abuse and rape only confirms that usually slave owners and overseers who committed sexual violations against their human property were not breaking the law. In their roles as slaveholders, they could freely take possession of the bodies of their human property. Despite persisting gaps, a number of written accounts tell stories of sexual violence inflicted on enslaved persons in the West Indies, the United States, Latin America, and Brazil.
House bondswomen who performed domestic service in cities and plantations were especially exposed to sexual violence. More often than not, they could not escape the brutality of slave owners and overseers. In Jamaica, slaveholders systematically sexually abused enslaved women. Thomas Thistlewood, the notorious British overseer, planter, and slave owner who settled in Jamaica in 1750, maintained a detailed journal during more than three decades of residence on the island.
His diaries report how white settlers, often heavily drunk, gang-raped bondswomen. This was the tragic fate of Eve, a young enslaved woman, who on the night of March 12, 1755, was raped by six drunk males.51 In its multiple entries, Thistlewood’s journals provide firsthand accounts of how he sexually assaulted enslaved women on a regular basis. On the first property where he worked as an overseer, he had sex with at least ten of the seventeen women he oversaw.52 A self-confessed rapist and sadist, his diaries document with vivid details how he violated and tortured Sally, one of his bondswomen. But Sally was not his only victim. Thistlewood raped other slaves multiple times as well.53Bondswomen endured sexual violence in other regions of the British West Indies. As explained in chapter 6, Mary Prince, who lived and worked as an enslaved woman in Bermuda, was sold multiple times to different owners who physically and mentally abused her. In her own words, one of her owners “has often stripped me naked, hung me up by the wrists, and beat me with the cow-skin, with his own hand, till my body was raw with gashes.” According to her, this same man sexually molested her. He “often got drunk” and “had an ugly fashion of stripping himself quite naked, and ordering me then to wash him a tub of water. This was worse to me than all the licks. Sometimes when he called me to wash him I could not come, my eyes were so full of shame.... He was a very indecent man.”54
Harriet Jacobs, the enslaved woman whose dramatic story was also briefly presented in chapter 6, went through similar experiences. Enslaved in North Carolina, she lost her mother at the age of six, and at twelve years old, her mistress died. Her early life was marked by family separation. As her owners either died or married, she and her relatives were separated. But when she became a teenager, she was constantly physically abused and sexually harassed by her owner James Norcom (whose pseudonym in the narrative is Flint).
In her words, “He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred.”55 As Norcom continued his audacious advances, his wife became extremely jealous and confronted Jacobs. Meanwhile, Jacobs lived in fear, as she did not know for how long she would be able to repel a man who was notorious for raping other enslaved women and had already fathered eleven children on the plantation. In her situation, a free white girl could have denounced her harasser to a relative or to another member of her community. But Jacobs was an enslaved girl. Her body legally belonged to her owner, as he told her. Even though many of her enslaved fellows knew about Norcom’s abuse, denouncing it was useless. Desperate to escape her owner’s threats, Jacobs entered a liaison with a lawyer and future US congressman Samuel Treadwell Sawyer. He impregnated her with two children, who remained Norcom’s property, because of Jacobs’s slave legal status, until they were later purchased by Sawyer.Jacobs was not alone. In Brazil, many other enslaved girls were sexually harassed and forced into coerced sexual intercourse with their male owners. Consider the example of Rosa (alias Rosa EgipcĂaca), an African enslaved girl of approximately six years of age transported from the Bight of Benin to Brazil in 1724.56 We know her story because when she was forty-four years old, the Holy Office of the Catholic Church’s Inquisition accused her of heresy because of her unusual religious activities. After being denounced and investigated by the church’s officials, she was sent to the Inquisition prison in Lisbon. The several pages of her interrogation reveal information about her life and religious activities. Among other things, she told the inquisitor that when she disembarked in Rio de Janeiro, she was purchased by a man named JosĂ© de Souza Azevedo, who had her baptized in the Candelária Catholic Church.57 Unlike Jacobs, who managed to resist her owner’s harassment, Rosa was raped by Azevedo, who “had deflowered her and treated her awkwardly” until the age of fourteen, when he sold her to the province of Minas Gerais.
But her story of sexual abuse did not end in Rio de Janeiro. Once in Minas Gerais, her new female owner, Anna Gracês de Moraez, and her partner forced Rosa into prostitution, a practice that was not uncommon for enslaved women who worked in urban areas.58 Abused by her owners and prosecuted by the church, Rosa eventually died of “natural causes” in the Inquisition prison in Lisbon in October 1774.59At the end of the eighteenth century, enslaved women who since their childhood had been sexually exploited by their owners were able to use the courts to demand their freedom, while at the same time denouncing these abuses. Well-known in Brazil is the case of the young Brazilian-born enslaved woman Liberata, who also experienced sexual violence and psychological abuse. In 1790, at ten years old, she was sold to JosĂ© Vieira Rebello, a man who resided near the city of Desterro, in present-day FlorianĂłpolis in the Brazilian southern state of Santa Catarina. Rebello sexually abused Liberata and manipulated her with the promise of manumission. Within a few years he impregnated her with two children who remained his property. Rebello recognized the paternity of the first female child, baptizing her as Anna Vieira. Yet, as his wife and children condemned the extramarital relations, he refused to baptize the second baby. As late as 1812, Liberata remained enslaved. She began a relationship with Francisco JosĂ©, a mixed-race free man, who attempted to purchase her freedom to marry her. But her owner rejected the offer, leading her lover to petition the municipal judge in order to obtain his bride-to-be’s emancipation. Although Liberata’s case made it to the court and she was eventually freed, many other enslaved women in the Americas whose owners promised their freedom in exchange for sex were not able to enjoy the same outcome.60
In other parts of the Americas, enslaved women and girls went to court to denounce sexual abuse perpetrated by their male owners, who would often even be supported by their own wives. Although not all testimonies were sustained by detailed evidence, some enslaved women explicitly denounced sexual violations. Cecilie was enslaved in Saint Croix, an island of the Danish West Indies, in the present-day Virgin Islands. In 1829, she testified to the police judge of the Christiansted Police Court that her owner, the overseer of the Boetzberg plantation where she was enslaved, coerced her to have sexual relations with him. Although she resisted, the man eventually raped her, but the manager’s wife interrupted the violation. However, instead of blaming her husband, she violently flogged the enslaved girl instead.61 The case never made it to the lower court, but Christiansted’s authorities fined the couple and ordered that Cecilie would no longer work for them.
Similar cases occurred in Brazil. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Henriques Ferreira Ponte raped the enslaved girl Honorata in Olinda, Brazil, immediately after purchasing her on August 3, 1882. Following the violation, Pontes raped Honorata two more times. After denouncing her owner, medical doctors submitted the enslaved girl to an examination that corroborated her words and those of the witnesses who testified in her favor. As in Cecilie’s case, the judge convicted the owner of rape. But Pontes appealed the court decision. The judge considered the rape of an enslaved girl by her owner immoral, revolting, and punishable. Still, he argued that such a violation was not a crime in the Brazilian criminal code, and Pontes was acquitted one year later.62 A few years before the end of slavery in Brazil, slave owners continued to have the right to rape their enslaved property.