Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery

Epilogue

Epilogue The women whose lives inform this study deserve and demand our attention. They deserve it because women existed at the center, not the margins, of the colonial landscape—in all its economic, social, political, and moral realms. Women enslaved in the American colonies found themselves at the intersection of ideologies that would profoundly shape the colonial experience as a whole. As early American settlers puzzled through the problem of creating an economic return out of a hostile landscape, the ability and willingness to commandeer the labor of others on the basis of the alchemy of race was crucial. Women of African descent redefined familiar categories of work, race, inheritance, and parenting even as the categories remained, and still remain, in play. The very fact that we can talk about women who were enslaved in early America is a testament to the changes wrought by introducing new analytic categories of race, gender, and class to historical studies. This study has been my attempt to follow the interventions of revisionist history to their necessary conclusions. When we invoke race and gender as critical analytic categories, we set in motion radical changes. The way we understand the configuration of power, the individual and collective meaning attached to events, the construction of communities, the rhythms of cultural encounter and transformation , the very terms of change are all transformed; for if one dismantles the assumptions about antecedents, then all that follows necessarily unfolds along fundamentally altered lines. If we ‘‘know’’ that Sally Hemmings stood by holding the candle that illuminated Jefferson’s desk as he penned the Bill of Rights, we need to realign our notion of fundamental freedoms. His ability to consider his own freedom from bondage is not simply a freedom embodied in whiteness but one delineated by sex and gender. The concept of freedom, which Edmund Morgan linked more than thirty years ago to slavery, is problematized yet again. But ‘‘problematized’’ is not always the same as ‘‘transformed.’’ In the end, Sally Hemmings is an anomaly by virtue of her notoriety. How many other names of African American women are so firmly etched on the historical record? Her sisters are reduced to their Epilogue 197 physicality, their anonymity belied by bodies that worked to both produce and reproduce the nation’s most valuable resources. Origin myths are powerful . And we must continue to ask what, precisely, ‘‘transformation’’ might mean. Despite the fact that the academic and intellectual community has changed since the creative upheavals of the 1970s, the academy continues to be fundamentally segregated. Although disciplinary boundaries are more porous, those boundaries still hold, and our intellectual interests are interpolated with our bodies such that attention to historical subjectivity is overwhelmingly assumed to be the province of historians whose own subjectivity is an object of scrutiny. We struggle to convert critiques of narrow visions of the past into constructive scholarship. We define the communities we study and find them bounded not so much by their own uniformity as by our own still-inadequate notion of boundaries. I don’t pretend that Laboring Women is a model of complex inclusivity, but it is the product of an intellectual and political environment that rejects isolated categories of identity in an effort to inch toward a more unstable vision of the past and, potentially, of the present. On the most reductive level, this study has illustrated simply that African women were there. They were crucial to all facets of racial slavery—to the generation of profits for those who owned and oversaw enslaved laborers and to bourgeoning notions of race as a tangible index of human distinction . I have argued that to write the history of racial ideology without gender is to omit the most fundamental reality of race as a trope—its heritability . Without understanding how the categories of race and gender inform each other, one is left with a one-dimensional sense of how these categories were mobilized and why they resonated with such clarity and violence in the lives of early modern Europeans. The connection between Africa and brute agricultural labor was forged in the heady mix of economic greed, prurient voyeurism, and rigid categories of ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ The illustrated travel narratives centered African women as crucial objects of European interest, objects that stood (and still stand) in for the lived experience of women working on American plantations . Of course, the symbolic importance of African women in laying the groundwork for the trade in human beings...