Visibility versus Voice: Enslaved Women in U.S. History and Memory

If enslaved women’s histories were once “matter out of place,” it is tempting to argue they are now matter all over the place. In the decades since the publication of Deborah Gray White’s classic book Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), monographs on enslaved women’s complicated lives have merited increased visibility and, at times, acclaim. But visibility and voice are not the same. Even as historians routinely investigate the intertwined workings of race, gender, class, and sexuality in Atlantic World slavery, the complex voices and subjectivities of the enslaved, particularly enslaved women, still feel elusive, the result of asymmetries that defined the societies in which they lived and the societies tasked with telling their stories.¹

In the absence of an established historiography, early scholars of enslaved women covered a lot of territory, both literally and figuratively. Some monographs focused on the modalities of women and slavery, distilling common experiences of the institution across time and space. Others highlighted exceptional women—Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, for example—through textured biographies. Yet even as the corpus has grown, so has unease with some theoretical and methodological approaches to slavery studies. Some question whether or not these histories of erased experiences are even possible, questioning the role of scholars as interlocutors whose redemptive histories redeem only their authors. Others push beyond the distillations of space—“Africa,” “the North,” “the South”—and subject—“the slave”—to analyze the contingent and constructed life-worlds that individuals inhabited and recreated, whether from places of subjection or from relative privilege.

Three recent works—Mark Auslander’s The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family, Sydney Nathans’ To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker, and Vincent Carretta’s Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage—are part of this larger project of using the lives of enslaved women as portals for examining not only their complicated subjectivities, but also the local, national, and even transnational contexts they shaped and were shaped by. The monographs employ the methodologies of their authors’ scholarly fields—anthropology, history, and English, respectively—demonstrating that black women’s histories are methodologically doable across disciplines. Each monograph expands present understandings of the many contexts in which they lived and the ongoing battles over their meanings and memory.

Histories of the heroic come with unique challenges. In penning the first full-length biography of Phillis Wheatley, Vincent Carretta had a tall order. Known for his scholarly editions of the writings of Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, among others, and his Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005), Carretta is no stranger to celebrated figures of African descent in the Atlantic World. In this monograph, however, he reveals a fresh perspective on this figure at once known and unknown, one whose symbolic meaning obfuscates the alternately unsettling and inspiring circumstances of her lived experience. Carretta uses archival and literary texts first to unsettle the notion that she was born in Senegal. She may have been born there, he contends, but she also could have been born as far southeast as the Gold Coast or in the interior. Whatever the case, in 1761 she boarded the Phillis and left Africa for the Americas via the Middle Passage. Upon arrival in Boston, she was sold to Susanna and John Wheatley, a dark daughter to honor a deceased one. Named for the ship that transported her to slavery, her masters educated and arguably pampered her, perhaps launching her into “a privileged class of the oppressed,” to borrow...