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>> 59 2 Sex, Honor, and Human Consumption Lilburn Lewis, a Kentucky slave owner, owned a considerable number of slaves whom he “drove constantly, fed sparingly, and lashed severely,” according to abolitionist Lydia Maria Child.1 Lewis was a typical plantation owner whom most in the local community probably respected and looked to as a model wealthy citizen in terms of his treatment of his slaves. In 1826, he would commit crimes against his slaves that would cause his community to ostracize him and pursue legal restraint; he committed suicide while awaiting criminal trial. It is hard to say from the evidence if George, a young recalcitrant slave on Lewis’s plantation, was a favorite or if Lewis consciously chose him, as many masters did, as the object of ritualized violence and as an emblem of his manhood and noble social stature. All we know for sure is that George, like many on the plantation, often went hungry, suffered the lash too often, and grew to despise and resist his condition of bondage. George provoked his master’s penchant for punishment by frequently running away in addition to disobeying. Sent to the spring one day to collect water into “an elegant pitcher,” George made the horrid mistake of letting the pitcher fall and standing by and watching as it “dashed to shivers on the rocks.”2 As punishment for George’s transgression, his master bound him to a wooden plank and in the manner of a butcher quartered him with an axe and cooked his severed body parts and pieces of flesh over a billowing fire. 60 > 61 ingests with the same relish that he would hors d’oeuvre, fine music, or cocktails served at an open bar at a ball. George and his ritualized punishment reify and ennoble Lewis’s white male identity. Powerful feelings of satiation, leisurely comfort, and pleasure accompany Lewis’s cannibalization of George. As parasite and consumer, the master takes in, imbibes George’s essence; George’s terror and the terror of all the slaves feed the master ’s authority and power. And we have to consider that in addition to emotional and spiritual consumption, the master might have literally ingested pieces of George’s flesh. Literal consumption was such a taboo topic during the time period that even radical abolitionists such as Child evaded direct discussion of this topic.6 When Child presented the facts of Lewis’s case in An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, she made no comment about the literal implications of Lewis’s flesh-quartering and -cooking ritual or about the significance of the secrecy that he continually reinforces through speech and act. This lack of comment from a woman who frequently noted the most extreme and disturbing implications of the slave master’s cruelties, indicates how taboo was the subject of human consumption.7 Understanding Child’s tentativeness concerning the topic of human consumption gives us all the more reason to wonder about the literal implications of Lewis’s cannibalistic ritual and the truth of what he really sought to hide through his constant reinforcing of silence and secrecy. I begin this chapter with this graphic example of symbolic (if not literal) human consumption because it illustrates how there existed during slavery unspoken codes of white male honor and respectability connected to the consumption of the slave. Master Lewis reinforces the secrecy and clandestine nature of his actions by bolting the door of the slave cabin, threatening like punishment to those who “disclosed the tragedy they were compelled to witness,” and excavating and secretly reburying George’s bones after the earthquake has leveled the building .8 Furthermore, his invocation of ball culture in his report to his wife clues us in to how he associated social esteem and finery with the cannibalization of George. A heinous and unspeakable bond of clandestine honor and pleasure taking binds Lewis to his slaves. As we see through events on the Lewis plantation, the most intimate sharers of the unknown secret were, in most cases, the slaves and the slave master, 62 > 63 exemplifies notions of etiquette, good taste, homoeroticism, and gender variance in shaping white masculinity on the plantation. Yet the slaveowning community to which Lewis belongs and Lewis himself both conspire to hide and contain, through legal reprimand and suicide, the reality of the master’s feeding upon slave and ennobling self and society in the process. Numerous documented scenarios of this type confirm that plantation masters...

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