America's Women

by Gail Collins

  When the slave ships arrived in America, the new country seemed so strange to the captives that some were convinced they had been taken by cannibals and were doomed to be eaten. Most of the early slaves faced lives of terrible isolation—only one in ten wound up in households with other Africans to talk to. Some embarked on a lifetime of passive resistance. Samuel Hall, a former slave, remembered that his mother, who had been captured in Liberia, “would never work after she was sold into slavery but pined away, never even learning the language of the people of this country.”

  “I NEVER SEE HOW MY MAMMY STAND

  SUCH HARD WORK”

  The first African Americans were free, and there were always sizable communities of free blacks in towns along the Atlantic seaboard. By the late 1700s in the North, black women had begun starting schools and organizing clubs that sponsored social welfare programs. Katy Ferguson, who became the nation’s first black female educator, was herself illiterate but possessed a determination to help New York City’s poor children. Ferguson, a slave whose own children had died in infancy, purchased her freedom in 1793. She used the money she made by catering parties for wealthy white families to establish New York’s first Sunday school and classes in reading and writing. She also offered adoption services for homeless children, white and black, taking forty-eight of those waifs into her own home.

  But soon the bulk of the American black population was composed of slaves in the southern states. By the mid-nineteenth century, there were nearly 4 million. The vast majority, including about 80 percent of the women, worked in the fields, plowing, hoeing, planting and picking crops. They worked up to fourteen hours a day, and perhaps sixteen hours at harvest time. The women did the same jobs as the men, using heavy iron tools to hoe and in some cases steering the bulky wooden plows, controlling the mules or oxen that pulled them. The elderly, children, and pregnant women were put on “trash gangs” that did weeding and cleaning chores. Those were the only work units that female slaves were ever chosen to lead.

  Slave owners expected women to do three-quarters of the fieldwork a man could do, but some did much more. At a time when a reasonably productive male slave picked about 200 pounds of cotton a day, Susan Mabry of Virginia could pick 400 to 500. Some plantation records list a female slave as the best picker. But even though both sexes worked together in the fields, the men did not share much in the family housework. “The women plowed just like the men,” remembered former slave Henry Baker. “On Wednesday night they had to wash and after they washed they had to cook supper. The next morning they would get up with the men and they had to cook breakfast before they went to the field and had to cook [the noon meal] at the same time and take it with them.” Men hunted for game and tilled the family garden, but even small boys were generally excused from cooking, cleaning, or washing chores.

  In addition to the fieldwork, many planters required women to do a quota of spinning or weaving before they went to bed. They worked as a group, with the children helping to card the wool. Bob Ellis, whose mother was head spinner on a Virginia plantation, said that as the other slaves worked, she walked around checking progress, singing “Keep your eyes on the sun. See how she run. Don’t let her catch you with your work undone.” The point, Ellis said, was to make the women finish before dark because it was “mighty hard handling that cotton thread by firelight.” Fannie Moore held the light for her mother to see while she made quilts. Sometimes, she said, her mother sewed through the night: “I never see how my mammy stand such hard work.”

  During her working life, a female slave spent much of her time pregnant, and most owners put a high value on good “breeders.” Thomas Jefferson wrote: “A child raised every two years is of more profit than the crop of the best laboring man…what she produces is an addition to capital.” The Plantation Manual advised readers to encourage reproduction by giving every woman “with six children alive” all their Saturdays off. Major Wallon, a plantation owner, offered every new mother a calico dress and a silver dollar. More important than the presents to many young women was the fact that if they became pregnant, they were much less likely to be sold away from their husbands and relatives.

  “I WANT TO BE IN HEAVEN SITTING DOWN”

  On large plantations, only a small percentage of slaves worked as house servants. Although those jobs seemed on the surface to be more pleasant and higher in prestige, many women tried to avoid them, and some deliberately failed at their house chores in order to get back into the fields. Their impulses were similar to the ones that made young white women prefer even the more unpleasant types of factory work to domestic service. Housework meant being under the close watch of a mistress who had high expectations when it came to her family’s comfort, and who might not know how to give clear directions. House slaves had no downtime—even their meals had to be grabbed on the run. When white people were in the room, they had to remain standing. (A spiritual from the era says, “I want to be in heaven sitting down.”) Residents of the Big House even expected slaves to sleep at the foot of their beds, in case they wanted something during the night. Angelina Grimke said she knew of a black woman who had been married eleven years “and yet has never been allowed to sleep out of her mistress’s chamber.” The image of the slave lying at the foot of the bed like a dog sometimes was extended further. Some slaves reported that, as children, they were encouraged to sit under the table during dinner and beg scraps from their mistress.

  Slaves were not permitted to learn to read or write. “If Marse catch a paper in your hand he sure whip you,” recalled Ellen Betts, a former slave in Louisiana. “Marse don’t allow no bright niggers around. If they act bright he sure sell them quick. He always say: ‘Book learning don’t raise no good sugarcane.’” Owners also feared, with some justification, that slaves who became literate would forge passes that allowed their friends and relatives to escape. But despite all the obstacles, about 5 percent of the slaves learned how to read anyway. Some were taught by their owners. Others simply listened while their master’s children learned their ABCs, and taught themselves. The idea of educating African Americans was so threatening in the South that even white women who taught free black children were sometimes arrested and a literate slave caught teaching others would generally be sold as punishment. Milla Granson learned to read from her master’s children in Kentucky and then instructed other slaves. When she was sold to Mississippi, she taught in the middle of the night, and slaves who had worked all day in the field—and, if they were women, spent several more hours spinning thread—sat up half the night, struggling to learn.

  “IT WAS FREEDOM BEFORE

  SHE COME OUT OF THAT CAVE”

  When female slaves were whipped, they were often stripped to the waist and tied to a tree, or from a rafter in the barn. Pregnant women were beaten, too. “They’d dig a hole in the ground and put their stomach in the hole and then beat them,” recounted Anne Clark, a former slave. A woman’s husband and children were helpless. “Husbands always went to the woods when they know the wives was due for a whipping,” remembered Jordan Johnson. “But in the field they dare not leave. Had to stay there, not daring even [to] look like they didn’t like it.” Once, Johnson said, a slave named Annie Jones was working in the same field with her husband while she was far along in a pregnancy. When she made a mistake and chopped down some young cotton plants, the overseer beat her until she fell to the ground screaming. “And Charlie he just stood there hearing his wife scream and staring at the sky, not daring to look at her or even say a word.”

  Leah Garrett remembered one man who hid his wife in the woods when she was threatened with a beating. “He carried her to a cave and hauled pine straw and put [it] in there for her to sleep on,” she said. “He fixed that cave up just like a house for her, put a stove in there and run the pipe out through the ground into a swamp…. He sealed the house with pine logs, made beds and tables out of pine poles, and they lived in this cave seven years. During this time they had three children…and they
was wild.” Her husband, who stayed on the plantation, brought the woman food, Garrett said, and “it was freedom before she come out of that cave for good.”

  That kind of active resistance was rare. Slaves who endured repeated beatings often responded much like battered wives or abused children. They lost confidence, became dependent on the judgments of others, and sometimes identified with the very people who abused them. Salomon Oliver, whose mother was beaten to death by white overseers, concluded that she might have deserved it: “I guess sometimes she took advantage and tried to do things that maybe wasn’t right.”

  “WE MADE THE GALS HOOPS OUT OF GRAPEVINES”

  In the 1930s, Violet Guntharpe, an elderly South Carolinian, remembered being courted by her future husband when she was a fifteen-year-old slave. “I glance at him one day at the pigpen when I was slopping the hogs. I say, ‘Mr. Guntharpe, you follows me night and morning to this pigpen; do you happen to be in love with one of those pigs?’…Thad didn’t say nothing but just grin. Him took the slop bucket out of my hand and look at it, all round it, put it upside down on the ground, and set me on it…. Us carry on foolishness about the little boar shoat pig and the little sow pig, then I squeal with laughter. The slop bucket tipple over and I lost my seat. That ever remain the happiest minute of my eighty-two years.”

  Under slavery, African Americans led desperately constricted and frequently brutal existences. But ordinary life went on as well. For most, the average day was filled with couplings and quarreling, friendship and feuds, moments of silliness, acts of selfishness, and gestures of incredible kindness. They carved out their own worlds as best they could.

  Plantation slaves typically lived in one-room cabins. Some were substantial, with plank floors raised well above the ground and solid chimneys. But many were as small as ten feet square, with dirt floors and no windows. Although some former slaves reminisced about the sturdy furniture their fathers made for the cabins, and visitors sometimes reported seeing homes that were well appointed and decorated with painted china or wall hangings, most had little but mattresses made of straw or moss, and some pots for cooking. Slaves often had plots of land where they gardened, although the work had to be done, as one recalled, “on moonlight nights and on a Saturday evening.” Although visitors to Southern plantations often commented on the unwashed bodies and soiled clothes of the house servants, Southerners seldom said anything about their slaves’ hygiene, and they may have regarded cleanliness as something reserved to the upper class. (When Fanny Kemble urged her husband’s slaves to tidy their houses, they protested—probably with some accuracy—that they were already as clean as poor white households.) Certainly a woman who had spent twelve hours in the field and a few more spinning thread wouldn’t want to do much heavy-duty scrubbing. But according to the oral histories taken from ex-slaves in the 1930s, many mothers struggled to wash the family clothes every weekend, and women told how, as young girls, they kept their best dress pressed with flowers and herbs so it would smell nice. A white Georgian recalled seeing, on Saturday nights, the roads filled with male slaves on their way to visit wives on other plantations, “each pedestrian or horseman bearing his bag of soiled clothes.”

  Women often obtained calico to make a special dress for parties and church—some owners doled out calico dresses to reward good performance, and it was one of the first things slave women bought if they made money by selling garden produce. Red, which was reserved for royalty in some parts of Africa, was a favorite color. “Sunday clothes was dyed red for the gals…. We made the gals hoops out of grapevines. They give us a dime, if they had one, for a set of hoops,” recalled Gus Feaster of South Carolina. To stiffen their petticoats, girls starched them with hominy and water. Slaves tended to dress more carefully for church than the poor whites, and if they had to walk a long way to service, they carried their shoes to keep them clean.

  Half the Southern slaves worked for small farmers, who lived in houses only slightly more impressive than the slave cabins on large plantations. White women on small Southern farms worked exceedingly hard, and when a farmer became prosperous enough to acquire a slave, his first purchase was often a woman to help his wife. “That sure was hard living there,” recalled Mary Lindsay, who was the only slave of a poor white blacksmith. “I have to get up at three o’clock sometimes so I have time to water the horses and slop the hogs and feed the chickens and milk the cows, and then get back to the house and get the breakfast.” A former slave in Nashville whose master hired her out to a working-class family said that she was required “to nurse, cook, chop in the fields, chop wood, bring water, wash, iron and in general just do everything.” She was six years old at the time.

  Besides the multitudinous chores, the lone slave was cut off from the community that was the one great source of comfort and support in a world where she was regarded as something less than fully human by the whites. Katie Phoenix, who was sold as a little girl to a solitary woman who had no other slaves, said she had no idea that she was a child until her mistress’s granddaughter came for a visit. “I thought I was just littler, but as old as grown-ups. I didn’t know people had grown up from children,” she said.

  Christmas was the biggest holiday of the year. “Slaves lived just for Christmas to come round,” said Fannie Berry. “Start getting ready the first snowfall. Commence to saving nuts and apples, fixing up party clothes, snitching lace and beads from the big house. General celebrating time, you see, because husbands is coming home and families is getting united again. Husbands hurry on home to see the new babies. Everybody happy.” On regular Saturday nights there were dances in the slave quarters or gatherings of young people who played kissing games. “Used to go over to the Saunders place for dancing,” said Fannie Berry. “Must have been a hundred slaves over there, and they always had the best dances…. Gals always tried to fix up for partying, even if they ain’t got nothing but a piece of ribbon to tie in their hair.” Courtship rituals were much like those of other working-class Americans. Girls concerned themselves with their hair and dresses. “All week they wear the hair rolled up with cotton,” said Amos Lincoln of Charleston. “Sunday come, they comb the hair out fine.” Like white girls of the era, the young slaves felt eating in public was unladylike, and they ate at home before they went out to dinner. Men initiated a romantic pursuit, but the chain of approval necessary for courting a slave girl was more arduous than that of an upper-class heiress. “Couldn’t spring up, grab a mule and ride to the next plantation without a pass,” explained Andy Marion, a former slave who remembered the difficulties for men who couldn’t find a desirable partner on their own plantation. “Suppose you get your master’s consent to go? Look here, the girl’s master’s got to consent, the gal got to consent, the gal’s daddy got to consent, the gal’s mammy got to consent. It was a hell of a way!”

  “A CHANCE HERE THAT WOMEN HAVE

  NOWHERE ELSE”

  It was not unusual for unwed girls to get pregnant, but they generally were married soon after, frequently to their child’s father. Most slave communities did not think that premarital sex was immoral, although they vigorously disapproved of adultery. Slave women, the well-to-do Virginian Mary Chesnut wrote somewhat enviously, “have a chance here that women have nowhere else. They can redeem themselves—the ‘impropers’ can. They can marry decently and nothing is remembered against these colored ladies.” This attitude toward premarital sex was probably carried from Africa, where a woman who had demonstrated her fertility was seen as a more valuable marriage partner than an untested virgin. But as African Americans converted to Christianity, the standards for sexual behavior changed in some communities. Priscilla McCullough, who had been a slave in Darien, Georgia, said that sexually active girls were sometimes “put on the banjo…. When they play that night they sing about that girl and they tell all about her. That’s putting on the banjo. Then everybody know and that girl she better change.”

  Slaves were not allowed to marry legally, but they almost alwa
ys celebrated their union with a ceremony. Many preferred religious services—as many as two-fifths of the Episcopalian weddings in the Confederate states in the year before the war involved slaves. But the ministers never said “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.” The white owner could sunder a marriage with the wave of a pen, and in the eyes of the law, slaves could no more marry than they could go to court, own property, or control their children’s fate. One black preacher in Kentucky, in a stroke of realism, told his brides and grooms that they were married “until death or distance do you part.”

  Sometimes an owner underwrote the wedding of a favored slave, including a feast for the entire plantation. “We was married on the front porch of the big house,” recalled Temple Durham, a former slave in North Carolina. “…Miss Betsy had Georgianna, the cook, to bake a big wedding cake all iced up white as snow with a bride and groom standing in the middle holding hands…. I had on a white dress, white shoes and long white gloves that come to my elbow, and Miss Betsy done made me a wedding veil out of a white net window curtain. When she played the wedding march on the piano, me and Exter marched down the walk and up on the porch to the altar Miss Betsy done fixed…. Exter done made me a wedding ring. He made it out of a big red button with his pocket knife. He done cut it so round and polished it so smooth that it looked like a red satin ribbon tied around my finger.” Temple and her husband retired to a cabin that had been fixed up for the wedding night, but the next day he had to return to his own plantation. “But he come back every Saturday night,” she said. “We had 11 children.”