Haunted by Tragedy
Bondswomen were obviously aware that their children were enslaved upon birth. As mothers, they were also conscious that they could be separated from their children at any time. Before their offspring reached adulthood, many enslaved women were likely to face tragic moments that led them to make the extremely difficult choice to unwillingly engage their children in the daily atrocities of slavery.
As a drastic measure, some enslaved mothers attempted and sometimes succeeded in killing their children and taking their own lives. Such tragedies occurred throughout the entire era of Atlantic slavery in various regions of the Americas. Although bondswomen’s specific motives for infanticide are rarely clear in surviving written sources, one can infer that either one specific traumatic event or the long sequence of atrocities endured by these women led them to commit extreme acts of violence against their own kin. In most cases, enslaved women seemed to have impulsively murdered their own children rather than subject them to the horrors of slavery. But a closer look at their actions may reveal that to some extent these murders were planned. Their stories show how motherhood represented a deadlock for many bondswomen.The combination of motherhood and slavery was haunted by tragedy. Although the Roman Catholic Church ruled that slave owners should not separate enslaved mothers from their children, especially young children who were still feeding on mother’s milk, the principle was not always respected, especially when financial matters were in play.34 Moreover, even when enslaved parents purchased the freedom of their children, such agreements were not always fulfilled.35 In the Viceroyalty of New Granada, which corresponds to the present-day region of today’s Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela, one historian uncovered the case of Phelipa, a forty-year-old married enslaved woman who lived with her husband and two children in the region of Tolima, in modern-day Colombia.
All the family was owned by the same man, Don Pedro de Sarachaga, with whom they went to a rodeo, an event during which cattle were branded and counted, in January 1768. While the owner handled the cattle with other men, the news came that Phelipa had stabbed herself as well as her sixteen-year-old son Joseph Victor and her five-year-old daughter Catharina. Whereas Phelipa and her son survived, the young Catharina died the day after. According to one witness, when asked why she killed her child, Phelipa responded that her owner would separate them. Yet, to another witness she said she stabbed her children for the love she had for them, love that refused to accept the violence of slavery that separated a mother and her children.36 Phelipa’s case was not unique. In the 1780s, in response to the mistreatment inflicted on them by her owner, a case of an enslaved mother who committed infanticide in a gold mine of the province of Barbacoas in Colombia was uncovered as well.37Similar cases of enslaved mothers who took the lives of their enslaved children also occurred in Brazil. In some regions, these cases were documented in detail. Take the example of Maria, an enslaved woman who lived and worked in the then-captaincy of São Pedro do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil.38 In 1819, when Maria was around twenty-four years old, she killed her two children by slitting their throats. As with many enslaved women living in remote regions of Brazil, we do not know much about Maria, but the records of the criminal proceedings and trial that followed this tragedy allow us to draw a broader picture of what her life may have looked like.
Maria was born in the late eighteenth century in Rio Grande, a coastal town in the south of present-day Rio Grande do Sul, not far from the boarder with Uruguay, and lived in slavery in a rural area north of the then municipality of Porto Alegre. With a total population of 52,226, of which nearly 30 percent were enslaved in 1810, the captaincy of Rio Grande do Sul was scarcely populated in comparison to other Brazilian captaincies such as Rio de Janeiro.39 Unlike other plantation and mining regions in the Americas, cattle ranching and jerk beef factories were the most important economic activities employing the work of enslaved men and women in this region.40 In addition to the cold and humid weather, the working and living conditions for the enslaved population were extremely hard in Rio Grande do Sul.41
Maria’s owners, José Bittencourt Cidade and Angélica Velosa da Fontoura Azambuja, owned other human property as well.
In 1825, just six years after the tragic death of Maria’s children, twenty-eight Brazilian-born and African-born enslaved men, women, and children of various ages were listed in Cidade’s postmortem inventory. Like other enslaved women working in rural households, Maria probably performed domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and sewing. We do not know exactly what she looked like, but at age twenty-four, after at least two pregnancies brought to term, her body reportedly was robust. Her face was round, her eyes black, her hair curly, and her lips thick. Identified as single, she had two children, Manoel and Manoela, but surviving records do not reveal their exact ages. Manoel was probably older than five, as he already performed some tasks in the household. Younger, Manoela was likely a toddler.Existing records do not allow us to understand how Maria became a mother. But a portrait of the enslaved population living in the estate where she was enslaved provides us with some clues. In 1825, Maria’s owner held twenty-eight enslaved persons, a high number for a remote region like Rio Grande do Sul. Most of these slaves were born in Africa and were identified as belonging to Hausa, Cabinda, Mina, Mozambique, Benguela, and Congo groups of provenance. Among these enslaved persons, there were twenty-one males, including one enslaved boy and two other enslaved young men fourteen years old. But among the twenty-eight slaves there were only seven enslaved women. Moreover, only four of them, aged between twenty and twenty-eight, were of reproductive age. We do not know who among these enslaved persons already lived and worked in Cidade’s estate when Maria killed her two children, and the records do not allow us to conclude that any of these enslaved persons were married. But the large number of men for the small number of women suggests they had more than one male partner. Therefore, Maria’s children Manoel and Manoela could have been the offspring of any of the enslaved adult males who lived in the estate, including two enslaved men who were also named Manoel, which, like Maria, was a very common name in Brazil.
As with other bondswomen living in the domestic spaces, Maria was also exposed to physical and psychological abuse and was at the mercy of her master and his male children’s sexual advances. Consequently, it would not be surprising if her owner or his male children had sex with Maria and impregnated her.42The days that led to the horrible night of March 15 must have been particularly traumatizing to Maria. She worked in the domestic space and so knew where her owner kept his razor. Maria was in her bedroom on March 15, 1819, at dawn after what must have been a warm night in rural Rio Grande do Sul. Like the quarters of other enslaved people living in Brazil during the nineteenth century, the bedroom where she slept with her two children was more likely a narrow filthy dungeon. The room was located near the kitchen, allowing Maria to be available both day and night to respond to her owners’ calls. She may have seen him shaving several times before she decided that the razor was the best weapon to end her miserable life and that of her children. On March 14, Maria took her owner’s razor and brought it to her room. She needed determination to act fast as she would not be able to keep the razor in her room without her owner noticing the blade was gone. We do not know the horrible thoughts that preceded Maria’s fatal actions, but early that morning, about seven o’clock, she slit Manoel’s and Manoela’s throats and then tried to slit her own.
After being arrested and during her interrogation, Maria did not narrate her tragedy in detail. Even though they did not witness the moment when Maria carried out the infanticide and attempted to end her own life, the various witnesses who provided testimonies during the criminal proceedings repeated the same story, based on what Angélica, Maria’s mistress, told them. According to Angélica, she was awake by 7:00 a.m. and noticed that Manoel had failed to show up to perform his early morning tasks. Assuming Maria and her two children had run away, Angélica began to search for the trio but curiously failed to look in the enslaved woman’s bedroom near the kitchen. At some point she heard Manoel screaming that his mother was trying to kill him.
Angélica asked for help to break the room’s door open and found Maria and her two children inside with their throats slit. Manoela was dead, but Manoel and Maria were still alive. When asked what happened to him, by showing his fingers cut by the razor, the enslaved boy indicated that his mother attacked him while he was trying to defend himself. Manoel did not survive, but Maria did.After being arrested, during her interrogatory, Maria stated that she had no intent to murder her children but only to kill herself. According to her answers, she had been accused of wrongs committed by other enslaved persons on the estate. As argued by Maria’s legal representative in his passionate defense, the only plausible explanation she had for attacking her children was the psychological and physical abuse her mistress inflicted on her.43 His conclusions were not surprising. White women purchased and sold enslaved people. They were not only slave owners, however. They also reinforced the violence their husbands perpetrated on bondspeople. Even sociologist Gilberto Freyre—who wrongly claimed that slave owners and enslaved people entertained harmonious relations in Brazil—has provided numerous examples of how female slave owners inflicted physical punishments on bondswomen. These stories include young mistresses who had the eyes of beautiful enslaved maids “gouged out and then served to their husbands for dessert in a jelly dish, floating in blood that was still fresh,” and “young adult baronesses who out of jealousy or spite had fifteen-year-old mulatto girls sold off to old libertines.”44
Similar accounts also existed in the United States, where enslaved women were likewise victimized by their mistresses.45 Curiously, Maria’s criminal proceedings do not mention the testimonies of Maria’s owners, which suggests that they did not testify. As enslaved people could not testify under oath before a judge at the time of these tragic events, we will never know their point of view on the tragedy.
But even more disturbing is the fact that Maria’s body was not examined for any signs of physical mistreatment. Here, the violence of slavery overpowered the abstract notion of maternal love. Maria knew that as a mother in bondage, the only power she had to keep her children out of slavery was to kill them. Only such a desperate act could free them from a future of extreme physical and psychological abuse.Maria’s tragic story is one of many involving enslaved mothers who killed their children after being constantly abused by male and female slave owners in the Americas. Just a few years after Maria’s tragedy, on October 29, 1824, another bondswoman also named Maria killed her son Adão. An African-born enslaved woman in her early forties, this second Maria lived in Rio Pardo, Rio Grande do Sul, in the household of her owners, Captain Manuel Baptista de Mello and his wife Bernardina, who lived off of the income generated by their bondspeople who hired themselves out in the city. Adão’s age is not revealed in the criminal proceedings, but he was young enough to live in the same room with his mother, and yet old enough to escape. Therefore, Maria’s owners held her responsible for keeping her son locked in her room to prevent him from fleeing at night. Maria knew that if her son escaped, she would be blamed and beaten.
One night, Adão used a nail to pry open the locked door and then escaped. Holding Maria responsible for not properly locking the door, her owners severely punished her. When Adão came back home late at night, Maria had been physically abused. Desperate, she grabbed a knife from the kitchen table and then stabbed her son in the neck, hitting his jugular vein and killing him instantly. The same legal representative who represented the first Maria ardently defended this second Maria as well, by stating that “maternal love, the duty of nature, is only capable of producing in the mother the defense of her child, and it is never cold-blooded to intend, and less, to cause her death.” He insisted that a “violent motive, invincible circumstances, and despair certainly guided the defendant.”46 Ultimately, he emphasized that Maria’s desperate act was motivated by the physical punishment and psychological abuse inflicted by her owners.
Yet another enslaved woman named Maria killed her one-year-old toddler Ricardo and her five-year old daughter CecĂlia in Rio Grande do Sul as well. Born in West Central Africa, this third Maria was single, and the records from her interrogation identified her group of provenance as Monjolo. Maria lived in the household of her owner, Sebastião JosĂ© Bernardes, in Viamão, by then part of the municipality of Porto Alegre. On the night of March 27, 1828, Bernardes started looking for Maria and found two of her three children with their throats slit nearly three hundred feet from his house. Based on Maria’s responses to the interrogatory and the defense by her legal representative, she was overcome by rage after her owner repeatedly forced her to provide “services superior to her forces” and inflicted on her and her children excessive physical punishments. As he constantly got enraged and irritated, Maria begged him to be sold, without any success.47 We do not know what exactly these physical punishments were, but Maria’s requests to be sold suggest that she was raped, and no one would be surprised if her three children had been the result of impregnation by Bernardes. Although Maria’s defense defined her fatal gesture as a sudden rage, killing her children was her only way out of her owner’s abuse and so could have been premeditated. The criminal justice system in place in the colonial era and after 1822 in independent Brazil imposed harsh sentences on enslaved women who killed their infants. But to some extent, the sentences imposed on the three Marias recognized their desperate acts in response to the extreme violence of slavery. The first Maria, who killed her two young children in 1819, was brutally sentenced to five hundred lashes and penal exile in Benguela in West Central Africa, therefore showing how deep the links were between Portuguese colonies on both sides of the South Atlantic Ocean. The second Maria, who killed her son in 1824, was also sentenced to five hundred lashes. By then Brazil was independent from Portugal, and instead of being sent into penal exile in West Central Africa, she was sent into perpetual exile to work in a Brazilian hospital for lepers. The third Maria, who killed two of her three children in 1828, however, received a milder sentence of ten years in prison. In general, these sentences were less harsh than those imposed on enslaved women who committed capital crimes in the United States. Although they can be explained by the influence of Roman Catholicism and the Roman law in the Portuguese Empire and Brazil, keeping alive enslaved women who committed infanticide was also a way to keep exploiting their workforce in the harshest possible conditions in colonies that used penal exile to populate inhospitable regions in the Southern Hemisphere.
Enslaved women were also driven to kill their enslaved children in the United States. Nine years before the abolition of slavery, the enslaved woman Margaret Garner was in her twenties and worked on a plantation in Boone County, Kentucky. She married Robert Garner, a bondsman who worked on a neighboring estate. In 1856, along with other enslaved people, Margaret, her husband, and their four children escaped. The group crossed the Ohio River to arrive in Cincinnati, from where they hoped to reach Canada. But once in Cincinnati, their owner, Archibald Gaines, along with several US officers, besieged the cabin where the family was hiding. Refusing to return to slavery, Margaret slit the throat of her two-year-old daughter. She also unsuccessfully attempted to take the lives of her other three children and her own.48 Garner’s dreadful story inspired the award-winning novel Beloved by Toni Morrison, a motion picture and an opera that also resembles in many ways the cases of the three Maria bondswomen who had killed their enslaved children in the deep south of Brazil three decades earlier.49 Garner’s tragedy again brings to light the dilemma faced by enslaved women who gave birth to children who not only were property of their owners but who in a number of cases also were the owners’ offspring as well.