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>> 127 4 Domestic Rituals of Consumption David Walker, a major black abolitionist figure, acknowledged the capacity of slavery to consume black bodies and souls. In Walker’s Appeal, Walker depicts a plantation reality where black men suffer emasculation. They can neither protect their wives and children nor can they themselves escape the all-encompassing power of whites whose malicious hunger, Walker says, “gnaws into our very vitals.”1 Walker describes the consumptive process as fundamentally an attack on male potency and phallic assertion: “They (the whites) know well, if we are men—” he says, “and there is a secret monitor in their hearts which tells them we are—they know, I say, if we are men, and see them treating us in the manner they do, that there can be nothing in our hearts but death alone, for them.”2 To Walker’s thinking, docile and acquiescing black men are more easily consumed. He advocates instead the virile, radical black male. This male, he predicts, will glut and violently overflow the consuming machine. Nineteenth-century black male abolitionists tended to agree with Walker; they felt that only male virility and a strong paternal role could save black people from social consumption. I noted in chapter 3 how images of human consumption haunted Frederick Douglass. He described slavery as a living entity that wore “robes already crimsoned with the blood of millions, and even now feasting itself greedily upon our own flesh.”3 Everywhere Douglass turned he saw slavery 128 > 129 Brown described a man named Walker, “a Negro speculator, who was amassing a fortune by trading in the bones, blood, and nerves, of God’s Children.”9 Solomon Northup, a free black man illegally captured and sold into slavery, linked the “gastronomical enjoyments” of whites and their entitlement to processes of consumption that involved starving, raping, and emasculating slaves.10 In emphasizing black male virility and paternity, black men sought to counter this national death wish toward the Negro, which they experienced as intrinsically tied to their social consumption. In this chapter, I want to complicate this idea of black male paternalism and radical insurgence as a final solution to social consumption because what such an assertion tended to imply was that only radical, paternal-type men could overcome or escape consumption. Along with radical black masculinity, black men emphasized traditional structures of the black family, reproduction, gender, and sexuality. As an example , the natural counterpart to the virile, insurgent black father was the black mother, whom most conceived of as the mistress to and caretaker of black civilization. In response to slavery’s habit of consuming black people in body and soul, David Walker advocates the restoration of black female maternity and reproductive power. The regeneration and sustenance of the race resides in “mothers who bore the pains of death to give birth to us” and within “wives, whom we love as we do ourselves.”11 While this framing of the black male’s social consumption was a useful uplift strategy, it limited then, and still does today, what we can know about the complex culture of consumption and the myriad ways black men resisted and grappled with the reality of their social consumption. The textual focus of this chapter is Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. The narrative offers many examples of literal, psychic, and erotic consumption. From slaves whose flesh is literally cooked to others fed alive to machines to still others starved into sexual submission and erotically consumed by masters, Jacobs depicts a shocking and haunting tableau of consumption and violence. Like her male contemporaries, Jacobs conceives of institutionalized consumption as a process that erodes familial ties, makes black men into “heathens” and “brutes,” violates black female chastity, and is antithetical to the black uplift project. For her, the 130 > 131 and complicated understanding of black male sensibility that we do not get from those black men who have come to us through history as representative race men. Rather than presuming that he is simply an example of emasculation and white parasitism, I ask exactly how Luke qualifies as a man and in what ways his gender and sexual variance necessitate a more complicated understanding of black masculinity in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, going against the nineteenth-century logic of the black paternal and maternal pairing, I draw numerous parallels between the lives of Luke and Jacobs. Jacobs also experienced homoerotic abuse at the hands of...

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