The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (review)

Writing on slave life in British North America, Alex Bontemps describes the psychological effects of what Black Studies scholar Maulana Karenga calls, “the holocaust of enslavement.” ¹ Becoming an African or Creole slave in British North America, according to Bontemps, involved social terror, cultural murder, physical torment, spiritual suicide, and emotional abandonment. Undeniably, African slavery beginning with its inception in Colonial America, evolved into a “systematic” attack on blacks’ “sense of self” (Bontemps, ix). Paradoxically, slaves themselves contributed to their own psychological anguish and demise by formulating an avenue of survival through the conceptualization of self-awareness. Africans and their American-born descendents had to acquiesce—at least in the presence of Anglos—to white hegemony and languish as subjugated docile beings.

Arranged in three sections, The Punished Self first, in “Spotlights and Shadows,” examines the many surviving records on colonial life in the South that attest to the absence of black self expression or subjectivity. These sources—produced by and for the members of the white elite—rarely made reference to Africans and African Americans as self-expressive people with ideas, feelings, and opinions. Rather, portraits, letters, travelers’ accounts, and memoirs almost always depicted blacks as objects. Paintings commissioned by or for Anglo planters portrayed slaves as “adornments, like drapery or furniture or jewelry”; and personal diaries of planters and national leaders like Gorge Washington and Thomas Jefferson routinely referred to slaves as “objects to be monitored, accounted for, and controlled” (Bontemps, 4–5 & 14). Ironically, when sources did in fact offer slaves a voice—as in the instances of travelers’ diaries and portraitures of West Indies planters—white authors associated the expressions of blacks with cultural savagery. There existed in the Colonial South an absence of African and African-American expression; there also existed a consequential silence among those who would in fact recognize blacks as human beings with subjective thoughts, feelings, ideas, and passions.

Part 2, “The Turning,” explores the cultural conversion that occurred among Africans as they transformed from “outlandish Negroes” to “fully seasoned” and “sensible” compliant slaves (Bontemps, 92 & 93). Through the use of newspaper advertisements, Bontemps skillfully explores the white assault on African self identity and humanity. “Outlandish” and “new Negroes” remained obstinate and dedicated to the cause of retaining their cultural identity and individualism (Bontemps, 92 and 93). Africans refused to give up their birth names, repeatedly escaped, defied authority, and celebrated their ethnic heritage (Bontemps, 92 and 93). Because of their insubordination, and because their outward defiance challenged white domination in the southern colonies of British North America, African “impudence” had to be dealt with swiftly and severely (Bontemps, 120–121). Violence became the ultimate weapon of social control against outlandishness—sexual exploitation, branding, flogging, flesh burning, markings on the body, castration, the cutting or mangling of bodily parts, the hanging of persons by the ears and thumbs, and death. The process of transforming Africans into obedient slaves involved not only physical pain but psychological torment as well. Enslaved Africans could, thus, resist their oppressors and die, or submit to their pejorative, inferior status as human beings and live in permanent physical, social, cultural, and psychological captivity. Even well-behaved “Negroes” who privately attempted to refrain from total submission by concealing their true sense of self identity and awareness ran the risk of succumbing to mental imprisonment and confusion (Bontemps, 92).

Part 3, “The Creole Dilemma,” addresses the quagmire of becoming and being a “sensible Negro” (Bontemps, 92). The word, “Creole,” not only defined American-born blacks, but also explained the societal transformation undergone by enslaved men and women. “Creolization,” according to the author, “in the abstract was a process of cultural change, but for blacks living in a slave society, it was experienced in the concrete as forced acculturation that worked as a process of subjugation and marginalization” (Bontemps, 143). Submissiveness through acculturation, therefore, allowed blacks to survive their ordeal as “sensible Negroes” (Bontemps, 92). At the same time, submissiveness proved a noteworthy challenger...