Something Akin to Freedom: The Choice of Bondage in Narratives by African American Women

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133 ‫ﱢﱡﱣ‬ NOTES INTRODUCTION 1. Hirschmann applies the notion of social construction, the idea that “individuals exist in contexts” and “cannot be understood outside of those contexts, as abstract and self-contained units” (10) to argue that “freedom theorists must examine specific concrete situations in which that construction takes place” (34). 2. See Valerie Smith’s Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (1987) and Frances Smith Foster’s Witnessing Slavery : The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (1979). Though largely concerned with African American women’s fiction , Anne Ducille also remarks upon this opposition: “Until recently, love and marriage were all but dismissed as female or, at least, feminized themes little worthy of study when juxtaposed to the masculinized racial and freedom discourse assumed to characterize the African American novel” (3). 3. To distinguish between the definitions of freedom previously described, I will use the word “liberty” according to its primary listing in the Oxford English Dictionary as “Exemption or release from captivity, bondage, or slavery,” referring here to the physical bondage of institutionalized slavery. 4. See “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images” in Patricia Hill Collins’s Black Feminist Thought (1990). CHAPTER 1 1. Frances Smith Foster elaborates on the standard construction of the slave narrative exemplified by Douglass’s 1845 text: “The antebellum slave narrative featured a protagonist best described as a heroic male fugitive. The usual pattern of the narrative was to demonstrate 134 Notes examples of cruelty and degradation inherent in the institution of slavery, then to chronicle an individual’s discovery that the concept and the condition of slavery were neither inevitable or irrevocable. Following that revelation, the typical slave narrator secretly plotted his escape and, at the opportune time, struck out alone but resolved to follow the North Star to freedom” (“Resisting Incidents” 65). 2. Genovese is not alone in emphasizing flight and insurrection as primary modes of slave resistance. The more recent Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the Plantation (1999) by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger provides a comprehensive study of slaves who fled their owners. The title alone indicates its conflation of the terms “runaway” and “rebel,” reinforcing the notion that flight is alone equated with rebellion. 3. Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) offers the most comprehensive historical account of the daily life of female slaves in the antebellum South. Also useful is Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (1985) and Stephanie M. H. Camp’s Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (2004). 4. The historical failure to acknowledge the subversive acts of slave women may also have roots in contrasting depictions of black men and women within legal and medical discourse. Drawing upon an array of antebellum trials involving slaves, Ariela Gross explores “the legal tendency to portray slaves’ character defects as ‘habits ’ or ‘addictions.’” This “had the effect of ‘medicalizing’ slave vice, reducing moral qualities to medical ones.” Gross argues that the “tendency to treat moral questions as medical ones seems to have been strongest when the slave at issue was a woman” (147), concluding that the “medicalization of women slaves’ rebellious character as insanity helped white Southerners to accommodate violations of their image of the female house servant as a docile nurse to their children” (151). 5. This sentiment is echoed by Hilary Beckles though her focus is on enslaved black women in Barbados: “As non-violent protestors, as maroons, as the protectors of social culture and as mothers, black women were critical to the forging of resistance strategies; and their anti-slavery consciousness is the core of the slave communities’ survivalist culture” (172–73). 6. Fox-Genovese observes an important relationship between white models of gendered identity and the opportunities for resistance Notes 135 afforded to black women: “The gender relations and norms of white society made it unlikely that female slaves would be trained for most of the specialized crafts or hired out for jobs that would provide them with an excuse for mobility. Female slaves were unlikely to become carpenters, blacksmiths, masons, or coopers . . . Since female slaves, like white women, were not expected to be abroad unaccompanied, they enjoyed far fewer opportunities for successful flight, unless they dressed as men” (“Strategies” 155). 7. Critics such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Gloria...