Monica woke up dizzy in the middle of that cold night of July 1820 in the deep south of Brazil.

She still could feel the bitter taste of cachaça in her dry mouth. Her body was aching from the beating her owner had once again inflicted on her. Drunk, the man had practically passed out and was still sleeping beside her.

We do not know if these events occurred exactly in this order. But it is probably accurate to assume that Monica killed her owner while he was sleeping; otherwise, she risked being killed herself during the attack. Also, Monica never confessed to having killed her master, with whom she lived in a remote, rural area, working in the fields and providing him sexual services. But in her testimony during the criminal investigation, she explained that her owner got drunk every weekend, and when he did so, he hit her. That night, she decided that he would never beat her again. Monica was not alone. Despite facing harsh consequences, all over the Americas other enslaved men and women were successful in putting an end to their captivity by killing their owners.

At every stage of the Atlantic slave trade, from their capture and transportation to their life in bondage in the Americas, bondspeople resisted the control and violence imposed by their enslavers. Sometimes a combination of internal and external factors allowed enslaved men and women to collectively resist slavery—for instance, by running away in groups and forming runaway slave communities. In exceptional situations, enslaved people organized rebellions. In typical plantation settings, enslaved men and women engaged in passive forms of resistance. They reduced the pace of production and damaged equipment and tools.

Take the well-known example of a group of enslaved men at the Santana engenho (sugar plantation and mill), in Bahia, Brazil. In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, a group of slaves killed the engenho’s overseer and escaped to a nearby settlement of runaway slaves (mocambo), bringing with them tools that rendered the mill they had left behind inactive. Public authorities sent an expedition of slave hunters and Native Brazilians to take down the mocambo. But the enterprise partly failed, and the fugitives eventually brokered a treaty with their enslavers that included several conditions that would improve their daily lives and give them control over their work.² In urban areas, enslaved people who worked in the domestic space daily resisted slavery using strategies such as stealing food to sell in the marketplace, feigning illness to avoid work, and simply undermining the accomplishment of daily tasks.³

Under certain circumstances, however, enslaved men and women took specific action to harm their owners. Bondswomen performing domestic work knew every detail concerning the intimate lives of their masters and mistresses. In this regard, kitchens were a crucial site of daily resistance. Gathered around the oven, enslaved women gossiped and plotted at dawn and during the late-night hours. Across the Americas, criminal records reveal stories of enslaved women who poisoned the food they served to their owners’ families.⁴ British and French planters feared being poisoned by bondspeople to the extent that from the seventeenth century onward, Jamaica’s slave code stipulated a death penalty for the use of poison by enslaved people.⁵ But enslaved men and women also opted for more extreme solutions to escape bondage, killing their masters and mistresses along with their children.

Enslaved women killed their owners as a response to rape and other forms of physical violence.