BLACK African slavery in the Americas was an institution so “peculiar” that even today it casts a dark shadow.1 From its origins in the 16th century until its abolition in the 19th century, black slavery was governed by tradition and local custom, politics and economic realities, and comprehensive state laws known as “Black Codes.” Black Codes regulated slaves (and free and freed blacks) and were constantly revised and refined in response to new situations and issues. For example, the Black Codes outlawed interracial sex, with its “horrific” byproduct of mixed-blood children. When legislation failed to eradicate it, the Black Codes were modified to penalize the offenders and, more particularly and grimly, their offspring. Ultimately, the Black Codes decreed the consequences whenever sexual intercourse crossed racial lines.
New World slavery was based on pseudo-scientific and pseudo-religious notions of race and justified its harshness on the grounds that God had entitled the white race to hold dominion over the black race. Blacks were considered to be childlike in outlook, animalistic in erotic expression and amoral in behavior. The Bible even spelled it out: black Africans, the sons of Ham, shall serve.
In this context, slaves were systematically denied rights, even the right to life itself. This was not just because enraged owners or overseers might torture or lash them to death. In the 18th and 19th centuries, entire plantations in the French and British West Indies, and to a lesser extent in the United States, operated on the principle that the most efficient and productive use of slave labor was to provide slaves with minimal food, shelter and clothing, and to drive them mercilessly to toil in the cane, rice or cotton fields. These exhausted and brutalized men and women died on average seven years after their arrival because it was, on balance, cheaper to replace them with new slaves imported from Africa than to keep them alive longer by providing more tolerable conditions. Harriet Beecher Stowe exposed this school of thought in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; its vicious antihero, Simon Legree, systematically ill-treated the slaves who toiled under the broiling sun in his Louisiana cotton fields.
Less brutal models of slavery were more common. But nothing guaranteed that a kind master might not resolve an economic reverse by selling off his slaves to the cruelest sort of master. Even the most industrious slave might suddenly find himself “on the auction block, knocked down to the highest bidder, and carried far and forever from those dearer than life, leaving behind a beloved wife and tender and helpless children,” a former slave lamented.2
This insecurity was fundamental to the form of slavery that targeted a specific race. Even the free or freed black and mixed-race population was subject to Black Code regulations that curtailed its rights and freedoms.
Interracial sexual liaisons were a key area of concern because each relationship posed a potential threat to the status quo. The obvious scenario was white men’s targeting of attractive slave women, though some white women also coerced slave men into sexual interludes. The single most dangerous factor in these unions was love. Love could inspire seditious thoughts (and deeds) about the subordinate role of blacks. This happened whenever a white man fell in love with his black mistress and began to treat her as an equal human being, or when he acknowledged his mixed-race children. When loving individuals legitimized what society decreed to be illicit, they shook the very foundations of their slave-owning societies.
Yet as we know from a variety of sources, including many eyewitness accounts, these unlawful intimacies were pervasive. The oft-quoted Mary Boykin Chestnut, the wife of a Charleston, South Carolina, plantation owner, confided this wry observation to her journal:
[March 14, 1861] God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattos one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over.3
Chestnut’s wry comments hint at the sweeping impact this licentiousness must have had: on the slave woman coerced into sexual intercourse with a white man; on the wife of the man who betrayed her with a black woman who was supposed to serve and respect her; on the mixed-race children born of these unions; on the white family members who observed and understood their patriarch’s behavior. Consider also the effect of this on the slave husband, brother and father powerless to prevent assaults on a wife, sister or daughter, and equally powerless to prevent her seduction by fear, by ambition and even by pride that the master had singled her out. Privileges such as reduced labor and gifts of money, jewelry or clothes were otherwise unobtainable for a slave. And what about the slave woman who unexpectedly found her heart engaged in this forbidden relationship? Or the master who fell hopelessly in love with the woman he owned or supervised?
To understand the world of slave mistresses, we need to bear in mind slavery-era notions of erotic appeal. White women were elevated onto the proverbial pedestal as chaste and pure beings untouched by erotic longings. White men, on the other hand, were thought to have naturally lusty natures; their drive to satisfy themselves sexually with women other than their virtuous sweethearts and wives was accepted if unacknowledged. Inevitably, this led these men to sexually exploit black women, reputed to be lusty and uninhibited beings who had extraordinary powers of sexuality, and who were legally, socially, physically and economically vulnerable.
The story of Phibbah, enslaved at “Egypt,” an 18th-century Jamaican plantation owned by John and Mary Cope, is told entirely by her white lover, Thomas Thistlewood, an overseer who kept remarkably detailed journals. Thistlewood’s daily jottings focused on his work on the plantation—indeed, his records are a treasure trove for agricultural historians. He also described, concisely but tellingly, Jamaica’s slave rites, celebrations, harsh punishments for slave infractions and—in clipped comments and reflections—the rocky course of his affairs of the heart and the bed.
Thistlewood’s journals detail his many sexual encounters with slave women, with Latin abbreviations: Tup (“twice”); Sup. Lect. (“on the bed”); Sup. Terr. (“on the ground”); In silva (“in the woods”); In Mag. or In Parv. (“in the great or small house”); Illa habet menses (“she has her period”); and sometimes, notably when his gonorrhea was in an active phase, Sed non bene (“but not well”).
In 1751, when the thirty-year-old Thistlewood arrived at the Egypt plantation, the Creole-Jamaican slave Phibbah held the important job of managing the cookhouse. It was not love at first sight. Thistlewood was strongly attracted to another slave, Nago Jenny, and brought her to live with him in his quarters for several months. Only when their relationship ended did he take up with the high-spirited, intelligent and ambitious Phibbah.
The relationship was deeply erotic and volatile. They had sex several times a week, including when Phibbah was menstruating. They quarreled, often because Phibbah was jealous about Thomas’s infidelities with other slave women. January 4, 1755, was a typical day. After they made love, Phibbah refused to join Thomas in bed and slept instead in a hammock suspended in his hallway. She was “rather too saucy,” he noted. Their quarrels were frequent. Phibbah spent days not speaking to Thistlewood, denied him sex, and sometimes stormed off at night to sleep alone in her cabin. Predictably, Thomas followed and fetched her back to his room.
In June 1757, Thomas accepted what was in effect a promotion: a new job at Kendal, another Jamaican estate, whose owner paid one hundred pounds annually plus generous quantities of beef, butter, rum, candles and other supplies. Phibbah took the news hard. “Phibbah grieves very much, and last night I could not sleep, but vastly uneasy, &c.” Thistlewood wrote on June 19.
The lovers continued to suffer at the thought of their impending separation. Thomas attempted to assuage Phibbah’s grief with gifts of money, lengths of cloth, mosquito netting and soap. He went to John and Mary Cope, who owned both Egypt and Phibbah, and “begged hard” to either buy or hire his mistress. John Cope was agreeable, but Mary Cope refused. Perhaps she dreaded losing such a capable manager and cook, or she may have disapproved of Phibbah’s relationship with the white overseer, which reflected her own husband’s affairs with several different slave women under their ownership. Mary’s intransigence devastated the lovers. They made love for the last time, and Phibbah gave Thomas a gold ring, provenance unknown, as a keepsake. He said his goodbyes and left for Kendal.
Phibbah, alone at Egypt, was terrified that Thomas would replace her with another woman. Her fears were well grounded. One week after his arrival, Thistlewood relieved his mighty loneliness with Phoebe, the slave cook on the Kendal estate. Knowing nothing of this, Phibbah rode over to Kendal the next day to plead with Thomas to come back to Egypt.
It was not as simple as deciding to return. Thomas had accepted a new job and had contractual obligations. But he was delighted to see his mistress. He escorted her all around the estate and introduced her to the inmates of the “Negro houses.” They rose before dawn the next day, and he lent Phibbah his horse so she could make a speedy trip back to Egypt. “I wish they would sell her to me,” he complained. “Tonight very lonely and melancholy again … and Phibbah’s being gone this morning still fresh in my mind.”5
Phibbah made sure she stayed that way. She sent him a stream of gifts (turtles, crabs) and visited him whenever she could. News that she was ill upset Thistlewood deeply. “Poor girl, I pity her, she is in miserable slavery,” he lamented. Their joyous reunions, replete with gift-giving, gossiping and squabbling, continued. Sometimes Thistlewood would send Lincoln, his own teenaged slave, to Egypt with his horse so Phibbah could ride over to Kendal. At other times, he made the journey to Egypt.
Despite his strong affection for Phibbah, Thomas regularly cheated on her with other women, including Aurelia, the loveliest of the Kendal slaves. Phibbah knew and suffered. She implored him to desist and underscored her frustration and pain by withholding sex. In the end, she always relented and forgave him.
When they were apart, Phibbah worked assiduously to maintain their relationship. Her frustration at her inability to leave Egypt and join Thomas at Kendal resonates through his concise reports of what she said to him and how she acted. But was this true love or merely an astute woman’s recognition of the many advantages of her status as Thistlewood’s mistress? It’s impossible to know for sure, but all indications are that Phibbah loved Thomas as deeply as he loved her. Their erotic encounters were frequent and intense. They also shared the homiest details of their lives, even his infidelities, which he either mentioned or admitted to when Phibbah confronted him with well-founded accusations.
Over time, Phibbah evoked in her overseer-lover an anomalous compassion for her servitude, her miserable slavery. Until he met Phibbah, Thistlewood was known for occasional cruelties to the slaves he supervised. His intimacy with Phibbah, however, awakened his sensitivity to the wretchedness of slavery, and he conducted himself more humanely after their relationship began. As Phibbah’s feelings became more and more important to him, he began to shape his union with her so she, too, was satisfied.
Phibbah, for her part, used the power of her love and Thomas’s desire for her to force him to treat her more respectfully, though he never stopped summoning other slave women to his bed. In the context of 18th-century Jamaican slavery, Phibbah’s self-assurance and confidence in Thomas’s commitment to her were unusual. Though slavery and gender made their union hopelessly lopsided, Phibbah’s forceful character and willingness to demand certain standards of conduct added weight to her position. So did Thistlewood’s open acknowledgment that she was his mistress, though Mary Cope and some of the slaves resented her bitterly for this.
At the end of 1757, Cope lured Thistlewood back to work for him, and Thomas was reunited with Phibbah. By this time, Thistlewood was earning more money and had bought several of his own slaves. Phibbah, too, “owned” a slave, in fact if not in law, after a friend, Mrs. Bennett, gave her a woman called Bess.
When Thomas had financial problems, Phibbah willingly helped out. During her pregnancy with Thomas’s child, she sold a filly to another slave and gave some of the money to Thistlewood. He accepted it gratefully, and eight months later repaid her. (Thistlewood’s 1761 accounts show him indebted to Phibbah for ten pounds, a relatively large sum.) Phibbah’s generosity may have been calculated, but it is more likely that she genuinely wanted to help out the man who now referred to her, at least in his journal, as his wife.
On April 28, 1760, Phibbah went into labor. Old Daphne, a midwife, came to assist, and the next day Phibbah gave birth to a son. She recovered slowly. Another slave was sent to care for her, Lucy from the Egypt estate wet-nursed the baby and Mary Cope sent cheering gifts of flour, wine and cinnamon. The infant was named John, later “Mulatto John,” though at first Thistlewood referred to him as “Phibbah’s child.”
After a while, Thistlewood again left the Copes’ employ to work on Breadnut Island Pen, a nearby plantation. On the whole, the Copes remained valued friends for Thistlewood, and when Mulatto John was still a toddler, they manumitted him. (Manumission was the formal legal process of emancipating a slave.) Now, when Thistlewood moved away to Breadnut Island Pen, it was like Kendal all over, with constant visiting back and forth.
By 1767, Phibbah was spending almost every night with Thomas, rising early to return home. On November 10, John Cope finally “condescended,” in Thistlewood’s words, to hire Phibbah out to him for the annual fee of eighteen pounds. Six days later she arrived at Breadnut Island Pen with Mulatto John and her many belongings.
By 1770, Thistlewood had become a respected horticulturist and a member of Jamaica’s plantation-owning class. Despite his relatively modest holdings of land and slaves—at his death, his estate listed a mere nineteen slaves—his passion for books and his wide-ranging knowledge gave him personal credibility, and his friendship with the Copes eased his entrance into society. His slave mistress, however, was unwelcome at private dinners and parties. Thistlewood compensated for this by taking her with him to public events, the horse races, for instance.
Life was pleasant for Thomas and Phibbah, though less than perfect. They worried about the specter of slave uprisings. Thomas was anxious, as well, about Mulatto John, an unambitious boy who had not inherited the paternal obsession for reading and who told more than the occasional fib. Thistlewood blamed John’s sluggish progress on Phibbah, who spoiled and coddled him. And all of them were prone to illness, with gonorrhea still plaguing Thomas and sometimes rendering him impotent. (“Impots” he noted after one failed interlude.)
In 1786, when he was sixty-six years old, Thistlewood dictated his last will and testament. Five days later, he died. His will speaks volumes about his commitment to and love for Phibbah. He directed that his estate purchase Phibbah from John Cope for a sum not greater than eighty pounds Jamaican, and manumit her. If her manumission was granted, she was to be given two slaves. (As a slave, she could not technically own slaves.) Lastly, he left her one hundred pounds to buy a plot of land of her choosing and to build a house.
Thistlewood also provided for the worst-case scenario—that Phibbah remained a slave. In that case, she would receive fifteen pounds annually for her lifetime. It took five years to validate Thistlewood’s will. Then the Copes manumitted Phibbah.
So ends the historical record, though not Phibbah’s life. However inadvertently, Thomas Thistlewood was Phibbah’s biographer. To flesh out the bones of her life, we have no alternative but to read along and between Thomas’s brief lines, extrapolating and conjecturing as soundly as possible. The most sensible interpretation of Phibbah and Thomas is that, with the passage of time, she made a slow transition—at least in his mind—from mistress to wife. Though he was chronically unfaithful, he cherished her company and valued her opinions. He discussed his job with her, his labor problems, the state of the crops and the condition of the farm animals. Phibbah reciprocated with news about the state of affairs at Egypt after he had left the estate. When Phib-bah was ill, Thomas monitored her symptoms as closely as if they were his own, a reflection of their unfettered intimacy. Phibbah had confidence in their relationship, set reasonable standards of behavior and offered her assistance when she thought it was required.
Phibbah lost out only on the issue of sexual fidelity, and she had to endure Thomas’s unbreakable habit of straying with any slave woman he found attractive, even Phibbah’s colleagues or subordinates. But the journals make it clear that she spent her lifetime challenging his promiscuity.
Thistlewood never married. The dearth of white women in Jamaica may have been one reason. A reluctance to give up his intimacy with Phibbah, something a white wife would certainly have demanded, may have been another. But it is tempting to hypothesize that he had no need to marry, because in Phibbah he had everything he could want in a woman, including a mother for his children.
The longevity and intensity of Phibbah’s mistressdom, her manumission after her lover’s death and Thomas’s painstaking care to provide for her until the end of her days paint the picture of a complex and committed relationship. But romantic and sexual unions between a slave woman and a white man were never the stuff of romance. Though they circumvented many of slavery’s constraints, Thomas Thistlewood and Phibbah were no Romeo and Juliet. They existed in a cruel and confusing world where interracial sex was illegal, where she was legally subhuman and without rights and he was a superior being entitled—indeed, expected—to buy, sell, exploit and punish men and women who shared her status and her origin. Quite apart from her gender, Phibbah was a slave.
In the slave-holding American states, the infamous Black Codes reinforced social standards that condemned interracial sex. Despite the laws, discreet liaisons were usually tolerated. But if a man flaunted his black mistress or acknowledged the children he had sired with her, he paid the price of social opprobrium, if not actual disgrace. If he died leaving a will that manumitted her or named her and any children they had together as beneficiaries of goods, property and money, the likelihood was that his relatives would successfully contest the will. Time and again slaveowning-state courts disallowed manumissions granted in wills and denied the rightful legatees their inheritances. These strictures against all aspects of overt relationships between white men and their black mistresses were especially true of politicians, whose personal lives were supposed to reflect strong morals and refined values.
Kentuckian statesman Richard M. Johnson (1780–1850) was one such rebel. Johnson was a flamboyant, florid-faced man who favored red vests. In the War of 1812, he fought boldly, rose to the rank of colonel and became known as the slayer of Tecumseh, the native chief. After the war, while continuing to oversee his Kentucky plantation, Johnson entered the civil service in Washington, where he was respected as a capable administrator. At the same time, he rose steadily through the ranks of the Democratic Party.
Many Democrats supported Johnson as a candidate for public office until scandalous details of his personal life became public and what was previously dismissed as “monstrous rumor” was confirmed as fact.6 Johnson, his horrified colleagues discovered, had never married, but lived in cozy domesticity with Julia Chinn, a free woman of color he introduced as his housekeeper. Julia was his bosom companion, took her meals with him and bore him two daughters. Johnson acknowledged Imogene and Adeline as his children and educated them at good schools. When they were older, he arranged for them to marry reputable white men.
As if this were not shocking enough, Johnson had the gall to lead his two daughters up to the platform with him at a Fourth of July event. His fellow citizens refused to associate with these “quadroon bastards.” Johnson was unmoved and angrily declared that if Kentucky law permitted it, he would have married Julia. The news of this admission spread quickly, after which respectable southern Democrats who insisted on high standards of conduct turned against him.
In April 1831, the Washington Spectator lamented the possibility that, aided by northern supporters, Johnson would succeed in his campaign for the vice-presidency of the United States: “The colored will have an Esther at the foot of the throne … who may not only dictate modes and fashions to the female community, but may deliver her people from civil disabilities, and produce an amalgamation … [causing] an African jubilee throughout the country.”7
The southern, or Dixie, Democrats bitterly opposed Johnson’s candidacy, which succeeded only because of strong support from the west. A Kentucky journalist reflected that it was not Johnson’s cohabitation with Julia Chinn that created such a furor, but rather his “scorn of secrecy” about it. If only he would pass her off as his servant and deny paternity of her children—as countless other men did—then nobody would think twice about voting for him, certainly not his fellow Southerners.
But Johnson was stubborn and principled. In 1832, he legally conveyed large properties to Imogene and Adeline and their white husbands. The year after this propitious move, Julia contracted cholera and died. Even then, Johnson refused to recant, and to his opponents, he still represented the dangerous principle of amalgamation or mongrelization of the white race. In 1835, after he won the Democratic nomination for vice-president, the Virginian delegates stormed out of the convention in protest.
The little we know about Julia Chinn comes from accounts about sustained political opposition to the fact that Johnson refused to deny that she was his mistress and the mother of his daughters. Julia died before Johnson could test Washington as he had Kentucky. He had already anticipated and tried to mitigate the problems Imogene and Adeline would face after his own death left them vulnerable to merciless courts and disapproving relatives. He knew that what his slave-owning society despised was the transparency of his relationship with Julia and his daughters, which he conducted openly, without the subterfuge that characterized other such unions.
Johnson was the first major politician to defy social, legal and racial convention in this way, but only one in a long line of statesmen bound up in intense love affairs with black women. A combination of Jefferson-era gossip, testimony from ex-slaves, family lore and DNA testing has raised the possibility that President Thomas Jefferson was also involved in a long-term affair with a female slave, the now famous Sally Hemings. Hemings is the heroine of the movie Jefferson in Paris, and the subject of television documentaries, books, articles and explosive debate, including mean-spirited denials that a beloved president could have dishonored his wife’s memory and debased himself by loving this quadroon and siring baby after baby with her. Meanwhile, Sally’s descendants, nurtured on family memories, have had their claims partially vindicated by the results of DNA testing, which indicates that at least one of Sally’s children, her son Eston, was sired by Jefferson or one of his relatives.
Sally Hemings’s mother was Betty Hemings, the mixed-race daughter of an Englishman, Captain Hemings, and a black slave, Betty, the property of wealthy slave owner John Wayles. Wayles took Betty Hemings into his household as a servant. After his wife died, Betty became his mistress and bore six of his children. One of them was Sally, born circa 1773. When Wayles died in 1774, his legitimate daughter, Martha Wayles, then married to Thomas Jefferson, inherited his one hundred and thirty-five slaves, including her half sister Sally Hemings.
When her slaves arrived at Monticello, Jefferson’s estate, Martha took baby Sally and her other half sisters into the house to train them as domestics. In 1782, after a lengthy and debilitating illness, Martha died. Nine-year-old Sally and her mother were in the room as Martha expressed the tearful wish that her children should never be subjected to a stepmother. “Holding her hand in his,” recalled Madison Hemings, Sally’s son, “Mr. Jefferson promised her solemnly that he would never marry again. And he never did.”9
But after a period of terrible mourning, during which he paced incessantly or went on long, melancholy rambles on his horse, Jefferson did fall in love, again and again, with hopelessly unavailable women. These included Betsey Walker, his friend and neighbor’s wife, and Maria Cosway, the wife of English painter Richard Cosway.
Meanwhile, Sally Hemings was growing up. By 1787, she was a very light-skinned girl with straight, waist-length hair, and so lovely that the Monticello people called her “Dashing Sally.” She was also, according to a contemporary account, sweet-tempered and physically mature.
Sally’s arrival in Paris in the summer of 1787 has seduced the popular imagination, as perhaps it did Jefferson himself. This lonely man, sworn to eternal wifelessness and new to France, where the American government had posted him to negotiate commercial treaties and, in 1785, to be its ambassador, spent secret hours penning passionate letters to Maria Cosway. Suddenly, more or less coinciding with the arrival of his daughter Polly and her companion, Sally, he stopped.
Jefferson cared well for Sally. He provided her with extensive tutoring in French, a costly smallpox inoculation and heaps of new dresses. Jefferson may have been indulging Sally because he was falling in love with her, or because he wanted to forestall her joining her brother James, Jefferson’s chef, whom he had brought with him to Europe, in demanding her freedom. Sally, who became pregnant in France, did indeed use her status as a free woman in that country to extract a promise from Jefferson to free her children when they reached the age of twenty-one.
Sally’s infant son, Tom, was light skinned, and after Jefferson returned to America in 1789, he worried that his political enemies would claim that he had fathered the boy. Jefferson had reason for concern. His cabinet colleague and rival, Alexander Hamilton, was under sustained public attack for his affair with Maria Reynolds, a married woman. A long-term liaison with a female slave, on his own premises, would—and later did—provide ammunition to Jefferson’s opponents.
For reasons that remain unclear, from January 1794 to February 1797, Jefferson retired to Monticello. He withdrew from politics, stopped reading newspapers and focused exclusively on his family, his farm and his slaves. These included Sally, who by that time had several more children. But unlike Thomas Thistlewood, who chronicled the minute details of his union with Phibbah, Jefferson documented nothing about a relationship with Sally. The slave lists and the food and supply distribution lists indicate no special favor accorded to her or her children. Jefferson’s lifestyle, however, hints at a secret affair. Sally alone was responsible for his bedroom/study, and he permitted nobody else, including his grandchildren, to enter this sanctum sanctorum. Another telling fact is that, according to his Farm Book, Jefferson was always present nine months before all seven of her (very light-skinned) children’s births, and she never conceived when he was absent.
Jefferson’s neighbors repeated gossip about Sally’s being his mistress. In the spring of 1801, Jefferson’s adversary, journalist James Thomson Callender, set about snooping. He discovered that on April 26, Sally delivered a fair-skinned daughter, Harriet, named after a little girl who had died four years earlier. The despicable Callender turned to blackmail. Jefferson responded by giving him fifty dollars, but when he failed to deliver the post office job Callender was angling for, Callender trumpeted the news about Sally in the Richmond Recorder: “It is well known that [Jefferson] … keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY.… By this wench Sally, our president has had several children.”10
Pro-Jefferson journalists countered that Sally’s brood had been fathered by another white man. “Is it strange … that a servant of Mr. Jefferson’s at a house where so many strangers resort, who is daily engaged in the ordinary vocations of the family, like thousands of others, should have a mulatto child? Certainly not.”11 From Jefferson himself—public silence but private denial. There is “not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world,” Jefferson wrote to politician Henry Lee on May 15, 1826, and he repeated this to other friends.12 However, in the absence of a public disavowal from Jefferson, Callender gloated that “Jefferson before the eyes of his two daughters sent to his kitchen, or perhaps to his pigsty, for this Mahogany coloured charmer, the black wench and her mulatto litter.”13
A ditty sung to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” became popular in the anti-Jefferson camp:
Of all the damsels on the green,
On mountain, or in valley,
A lass so luscious ne’er was seen,
As Monticellian Sally.
Yankee doodle, who’s the noodle?
What wife were half so handy?
To breed a flock of slaves for stock,
A Blackamoor’s the dandy.14
A vicious ballad called Sally the “false Ethiop.” In it she has her throat cut from ear to ear, and her tongue hacked off. Then she is carted off to Hell’s blazing inferno. A gentler poem called Sally a “black Aspasia.”15 Another anti-Jefferson editor revealed that Sally had her own room, high status and close personal relations with Jefferson. This was cited as evidence that she was his mistress, though it could also have been a reflection of her status as the half sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife, Martha. Either of these hypotheses could explain as well why, at home, Sally’s children were privileged slaves, headquartered in the great house, his white family’s quarters.
The fact is, somebody fathered each of Sally’s children. If it was Jefferson, he did not see fit to provide them with more than a practical education. As teenagers, they were taught a trade. At twenty-one, those light-skinned enough to pass for white disappeared into the free world, not as fugitive or freed slaves, but as white. Jefferson never attempted to find them or, when their whereabouts became known, to reclaim them.
Sally’s son Beverly walked away from Monticello, crossed over, so to speak, to the white race and married a white woman. Jefferson paid Harriet’s passage to Philadelphia, and she never returned. Her brother Madison (named by Dolly Madison, then visiting Monticello) recalled in his memoirs that Harriet, too, passed as white and married a white man. Louise Mathilda Coolidge, a Jefferson family friend, confirmed that four of Sally’s children simply left Monticello and never returned. Madison and another son, Eston, the latter recently identified as a member of the Jefferson family’s bloodline, opted for their black heritage. They married black women and settled down in the same black community.
Toward the end of his life, Jefferson specified in his will that five slaves, Sally’s sons Madison and Eston and three of her relatives, would be freed at the age of twenty-one. He did not free Sally, or provide for her in his will. If this oversight was motivated by a desire to avoid giving his critics proof that their accusations about his relationship with her were well founded, then he sacrificed Sally to preserve his own reputation. In any case, two years after his death on July 4, 1826, his white daughter Martha freed Sally.16
Sally survived for another decade, living in a rented house with Madison and Eston. At her death, they buried her in an African-American cemetery. Her story emerges from biographies of her towering master. But much additional (albeit circumstantial) information may be found in the journals and letters of contemporary journalists, politicians, observers, friends, family and ex-slaves, notably son Madison and the unrelated Israel Jefferson, another Monticello slave. Sally herself left no diaries or letters, only anecdotes preserved in her son’s memoirs.
To date, it is impossible to state with absolute certainty that Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, although Eston’s bloodline supports that claim. What is clear, however, is that the viciousness of the charges made by Jefferson’s contemporaries underscores the contempt and fear that relationships between slave owners and slave mistresses engendered. If the American president loved an enslaved black woman, he was tacitly denying his society’s assumptions about the innate inferiority of black people, assumptions that justified the very existence of the institution of slavery.
Julia Frances Lewis Dickson was a slave mistress whose master-lover’s adoration of their mixed-race daughter, Amanda America Dickson, enshrined both mother and child in historical record and lore. So did Julia’s own testimony in a nasty court case in which seventy-nine of her deceased master’s relatives contested Amanda’s enormous inheritance.
Julia was born July 4, 1836, daughter of a slave woman and Joe Lewis, a dark-skinned man of Spanish descent who was, Julia told her grandchildren, “considered white.” In February 1849, Julia was a petite twelve-year-old with copper-colored skin, soft wavy hair and lovely teeth. She was owned by Elizabeth Dickson, mother of David Dickson, the richest citizen in Hancock County, Georgia. Julia was Elizabeth’s great pet. She worked as a servant in the main house and had her own room in a little house at the edge of the Dicksons’ yard. (Less-favored slaves lived in a large, two-storied dwelling known as the “nigger house.”)
The white Dicksons—the widowed Elizabeth Dickson, aged seventy-two, and three of her unmarried children, David, Rutha and Green—all lived together. David, a doting son, had single-handedly built up the family fortune. By 1849, he owned 2,010 acres of land and fifty-three slaves. David had little formal education, but compensated with great curiosity and powers of observation. His peers knew him as a knowledgeable but opinionated man whose word was law and who tolerated no debate.
At noon on a February day, David cantered across a field where Julia was playing. He came, saw and conquered, scooping the little girl up onto his saddle and carrying her off and raping her. (Years later, he admitted that he had “slipped” when he raped her.) He made Julia pregnant, and late in the fall, she delivered the infant to whom David and Elizabeth gave the dramatic name of Amanda America Dickson.
From the beginning, David was obsessed with his fair-skinned daughter. As soon as Julia had weaned her, he took the baby away, and he and his mother raised her as their own. Amanda became Miss Mandy, even to Julia, and spent most of her time in the bedroom she shared with her grandmother. At night, she slept in a specially made trundle bed that, during the day, was pushed under Elizabeth’s big one. David lavished affection and luxury on Amanda. He had her bathed in cow’s milk, then believed to be a skin lightener. He engaged a tutor to teach her to read and write, something his own sisters had never learned. Amanda read works of literature, had piano lessons and was pampered, protected and privileged.
Nonetheless—the ultimate irony—she remained a slave. Georgia’s Black Code prohibited freed slaves from remaining in the state. The only way Elizabeth Dickson and her son could keep their beloved Amanda near them was by foregoing her manumission.
Meanwhile, as she swept the Dicksons’ floors, mended their clothes and served them at table, Julia saw her daughter daily. She had to kowtow to her own child and watch her transmogrified into a nearly white, refined and prettily accomplished daddy’s girl. According to her descendants, who preserve Julia’s reminiscences in their family’s oral history, Julia never forgave David for raping her and exacted her revenge by ruling him “with an iron hand.”18
Julia’s “iron hand” (though not her fundamental resentment) may have been more wishful thinking than fact. Evidence from a variety of sources indicates that Julia and David developed a reciprocal affection that ensured her a dominant role in the Dickson household. She had been shunted away from Amanda, but in many other ways David treated her like the wife he never had. He thought nothing of kissing her in front of the other slaves or lifting her down from her horse. Often he and Julia sat together by the fireplace or in his bedroom, discussing domestic concerns and the agricultural ideas and plans that were to make him famous.
As Elizabeth’s health declined, the still young Julia and Lucy, another slave, assumed many of her duties, including guarding the keys to the storerooms where sugar, whiskey, meat, clothing and medicine were locked away, and overseeing the all-important kitchen. David also delegated to Julia various financial transactions with tenants and merchants. The picture that emerges is of a strong-minded woman who cooperated in building and operating the Dickson empire, who respected and felt some affection for the man who had fathered Amanda and who carved out her own authoritative role in his life and world.
After her abrupt initiation into sex and motherhood, Julia’s growing emotional intimacy with David probably included a sexual relationship. But she was by no means a faithful slave mistress. She openly consorted with Joe Brooken, another Dickson slave, and in 1853, gave birth to Juliana, Brooken’s daughter. Thirteen months later, she slept with “Doc” Eubanks, a white acquaintance of the Dicksons. David must have accepted these unions, because he neither reproached nor punished Julia for them, and even granted her more power in his household.
As Julia matured, worked hard and well, and conducted her liaisons with David, Joe and “Doc,” David was becoming wealthy and famous for his agricultural innovations. By 1860, he personally owned 150 slaves. Agricultural journals published his radical theories about conserving land through intensive fertilization, crop rotation, shallow planting and varied planting, strategies he claimed would lead to self-sufficiency. Slaves, he believed, should be taught more efficient ways of working, which would simultaneously increase both their pride and their production. “I have in five minutes, learned a hand to pick one hundred pounds more of cotton per day than he has picked on the previous day, and from that point he will continue to improve,” David wrote.19
David did not always practice what he preached, according to postbellum testimony from some slave “hands.” Eula Youngblood, Julia’s granddaughter-in-law, recalled that David implemented discipline through slave drivers who had liberal recourse to a whipping post. “When I think of those times I smile to keep from crying,” Eula said.20
When it came to Amanda, however, David gladly challenged his entire society by sharing his life with his non-white daughter. When guests asked if they were obliged to dine with her, David would roar, “By God, yes, if you eat here!”21
To at least one acquaintance, he acknowledged the obvious—that Amanda was his daughter. Another visitor, Dr. E. W. Alfriend, testified in a later court case that because of Amanda’s resemblance to David, he had pressed Julia about Amanda’s parentage. Reluctantly, Julia told him that Amanda was her daughter. “I told her I supposed it was, but asked if she didn’t have any assistance in getting it,” Dr. Alfriend recalled. Julia hesitated, and finally admitted “that it was ‘Massa David’s.’”22
In some ways, slavery simplified the dynamics of Julia and David’s relationship: no matter how forceful her personality (in any case, his was more forceful), no matter how strong his affection for her, and no matter how ambiguous and conflicted her feelings for him, David was the boss, the owner, the absolute authority. And though Julia grieved when Amanda was taken from her, she strongly approved of how David and Elizabeth raised her child.
Yet what little information we have about Julia’s life is confusing and contradictory, and this may well be an accurate reflection of Julia herself. For example, though she was described by everyone who knew her as a black slave, she told her grandchildren that she was Portuguese (by which she surely referred to her father, whom she also described as “Spanish”) and had no black blood in her at all.
No record exists of what Julia felt in the period preceding the Civil War, when the possibility that the South would secede became more likely, and the murmurs of agitation among slaves grew louder. She must have been torn between resenting her servitude and her awareness that her security and her daughter’s prosperity depended on David Dickson’s wealth, which was built on the backs of slaves.
David felt no such conflict of interests. During the Civil War, he supported the Confederates through “almost sacrificial” contributions of cotton, bacon, grain and enormous sums of money. As a consequence, the Dickson family’s wealth diminished daily. In 1863, Yankee general William T. Sherman arrived and occupied Hancock County. Though he spared David’s house, allegedly because of old Elizabeth Dickson’s presence, Sherman’s troops carted off hundreds of bales of cotton, stored crops, fifty-five mules and agricultural machinery. David’s plantation was ruined, though Julia managed to save the Dickson silver, burying it before the soldiers could steal it.
On August 20, 1865, the Civil War ended. The Dickson slaves, including Julia, were slaves no longer, but Julia chose to stay with the Dicksons. Her desire to stay with Amanda, who would never leave her beloved father, was probably paramount. So, too, must have been her sense that life as a slave had not been bad and might now be better and that, in any case, it was unlikely that she could ever, anywhere, find a job as responsible, prestigious (in its own way) and remunerative (also in its own way) as she had as David’s housekeeper. By the time Elizabeth Dickson died on August 6, 1864, Julia had truly become the chatelaine of the ravaged Dickson plantation.
At the age of twenty-nine, Julia was also about to become a grandmother, because Amanda was pregnant by her first cousin, Charles H. Eubanks, David’s white nephew. Because of Georgia’s strict laws against miscegenation, Amanda and Charles could not marry, but they moved in together on a nearby plantation David may have helped them buy. They named their son Julian, surely after Julia, his grandmother.
David, resolute and resourceful despite his ruin, began to build a second fortune. He applied for pardon from the US government, a necessary formality to recoup his estate, and declared—as he had to—that “slavery is forever gone.”23 At home, he openly regretted this fact because, like all former slave owners, he now faced a devastating labor shortage as black men sought better jobs, black women became their own homemakers and black children gained the right to childhood. Despite these setbacks, he persevered and prospered, manufacturing plows and fabricating “the Dickson Compound,” a fertilizer he sold at considerable profit.
Julia’s life took another major turn. Soon after Amanda gave birth to her second son, Charles, she suddenly returned home, saying, “I want to live with you, ‘Papie.’”24 David acquiesced, and built a large house for her, Julia and the children, three hundred yards from his own more modest dwelling. He ensured that they were its legal owners through a deed of sale that gave a seven-eighths share to Amanda, the remaining one-eighth to Julia. For the first time since Amanda’s infancy, Julia was permitted to live with her elder daughter, while her younger daughter, Juliana, and her family had lodgings close by.
David had another surprise in store, and it must have confounded Julia. At sixty-two, David suddenly got married. His bride, Clara Harris, was only three years older than Amanda. The marriage was unhappy from the beginning, as the accomplished and wealthy Southern belle found herself living in the lesser of two simple homes in a plantation compound, with the finer home housing her new husband’s black mistress, daughter and two grandsons, whom he loved to distraction. Clara’s brother, Henry Harris, later testified that David had been generous with his sister. He had provided a lovely coach and two fine black horses, and abundant spending money. He had also hired an architect to design a thirty-thousand-dollar mansion, but after sizing up the dynamics of David’s rural plantation, Clara was not interested in building anything there, Henry Harris said.
Clara was never happy, but not because David was unkind, Harris continued. Clara and her new husband were simply incompatible, and as a city girl accustomed to a lively social life, she was wretched. In addition, her health was poor. Henry did not add that David’s unabashed affection for Julia, Amanda, Julian and Charles was intolerable to Clara and made her a laughing stock.
Julia, too, must have suffered. If she was not jealous, she was certainly anxious about her tenure in the household and her future security, and she must have been wary of this spoiled and demanding intruder. However, years later, she swore under oath before the court conducting a hearing into David’s contested will that, by the time of his marriage, David no longer had sex with her. “We separated before he ever married or thought of it, I reckon,” Julia said.25
The marriage was short-lived, as Clara died of pneumonia before her third wedding anniversary. The period of David’s marriage and bereavement was a trying one. Julia turned to the Methodist Cherry Hill Church and devoted herself to its associated school. In 1874, she persuaded David, a non-churchgoer, to sell the church three acres of his land—for five dollars. David imposed conditions—if the land was not used for the church and its school, or if the roads fell into disrepair, it would revert back to him. This was hardly a major philanthropic gesture, but it was exactly what Julia had asked for.
In other ways, Julia’s life went on as before. She was still David’s trusted housekeeper. She still rode into nearby Sparta to buy supplies and sell plantation wares. Her commercial activities frequently brought her to the home of one of David’s friends, where she always refused invitations to join the family at meals. She preferred to eat with the servants, in the kitchen. Julia’s reputation, understandably, was of a “very quiet, inoffensive woman” who served David’s guests and was never forward.26
In 1885, David died. Amanda clung to his lifeless body and moaned, “Now I am an orphan; now I am an orphan.” There followed the living nightmare of the contested will, because Dickson had died wealthy and had left the bulk of his estate to Amanda. Seventy-nine of his bitter relatives challenged the will, arguing that Julia had exerted undue influence over him and had pressured him into making Amanda his principal beneficiary. Nine months after David’s death, Julia was subjected to the hostile questions of her adversaries’ scornful lawyers. Episodes from the past, true and fabricated, were bruited in the courtroom. Some have the ring of truth—that when she was a girl, David struck her during a quarrel, and she hit him back; that he treated her like a wife or sweetheart, not a slave; that they had publicly kissed each other. Others—that Julia had threatened to leave David, that he had wept maniacally at hearing this—were likely invented.
For Amanda’s lawyers, the difficulty was proving that though Amanda was Julia and David’s child, Julia had not been David’s mistress at the time he wrote his will. The enemy camp argued the contrary, that she had been his mistress, a position that would have enabled her to put undue pressure on him. Julia’s morals and credibility were attacked. “[Juliana was] the child of a black man, wasn’t it?” an opposition lawyer inquired. “A dark man,” Julia responded. “Wasn’t he a nigger?” the lawyer persisted. “I reckon they call him a nigger,” Julia replied. The lawyers pressed her, as well, about her three children’s different fathers—“You just confined your favors to those three?” “I don’t know anything about confining myself; I was not a bad woman,” Julia replied with conviction.27
Remarkably, the will was upheld, and Amanda became the richest woman of color in Georgia. Despite her grief, she was her father’s daughter, and she immediately took charge of her life. She bought a luxurious seven-bedroom house in Augusta and moved into it. And because of the “natural love and affection which she has and bears to her mother,” she gave Julia her seven-eighths of their house on the plantation. In another tribute to Julia, Amanda’s son Julian and his wife christened their first daughter Julia Frances II. (Two years later, their son David Dickson II was born.)
But more turmoil was in store for Julia’s family. Amanda married, without relinquishing any control of her inheritance. Instead, she simply gave her husband, Nathan Toomer, a free man of color, generous gifts. But her frail health, nervous disposition and a family scandal (her second son, Charles, though a married man, became obsessively infatuated with his new stepfather’s fourteen-year-old daughter, and tried to kidnap her) debilitated her, and in 1893, in her forty-fourth year, Amanda died.
She died without a will. New legal battles ensued. In 1899, Julia and her friend Mariah Nunn went to Amanda’s Augusta house, packed up its contents and shipped them to Sparta, Georgia, where her grandson Julian had bought Julia a splendid house set among pecan trees. Julia won the court case against her and was permitted to keep Amanda’s furniture. She told her descendants that she had had David Dickson’s body moved to a Sparta cemetery as well, and had erected a monument to him there.
Julia Frances Lewis Dickson’s life with David Dickson began with rape, and her sexual liaisons, particularly with Dickson’s slave Joe Brooken, may have been her form of defiance. Perhaps she simply fell in love. In either case, she clearly had great confidence in her ability to sustain her relationship with David.
Yet Julia’s circumstances were too complex for any decision to be simple. She must have rejoiced that David favored Amanda over anyone else, notably his critical relatives. At the same time, she saw and heard how he treated other slaves, rewarding those who cooperated, using the stick when the carrot proved unappetizing. Julia was one of those who cooperated.
Julia’s attitude toward her color and origins is less explicable. Despite what she reportedly told her grandchildren, she could not have believed she had no black blood—why, otherwise, would she have been enslaved? But constant exposure to slavery, even to David and his white visitors, who endlessly and earnestly discussed “the Negro,” must have influenced Julia’s perceptions. Perhaps she developed a pride in her reddish color and her unkinky hair, perhaps she hoped to distance herself from the degradation of bondage, as if hers had somehow been an error caused by her dark-skinned Latin origins. Perhaps David’s unexpected marriage to Clara Harris angered and frightened Julia. Her distress may be glimpsed in her failure to mention David’s brief marriage to her grandchildren. Like her black blood, his temporary defection just didn’t exist.
The fundamental contradictions at the core of the Dickson world must have bedeviled Julia for most of her life. In her reminiscences, she attempted to make sense of how she had navigated herself through that world, circumventing the dangers and maintaining her self-respect through bravado, intelligence, industry, religious observance and—in old age—the filtering lens of uneasy memory.
Unlike Phibbah, Julia Chinn and Sally Hemings, ex-slave Harriet Jacobs tells her own story in her book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Though abolitionist Lydia Maria Child edited and polished the manuscript, Harriet’s narrative, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent, allowed her to present her own experience of slavery and of sexual liaisons with a white man.
Harriet’s book is a female slave narrative, a literary genre much studied and bitterly debated. Narratives are by definition somewhat suspect, because the slave or ex-slave narrator intended, indeed longed, to reach a wide audience of sympathetic abolitionist readers, and she had to consider those readers’ backgrounds and expectations, including their desire for “specific, racialized conventions.” As well, the narrator had to contend with an editor who shaped, corrected, altered and excised material in accordance with ideology or personal predilection.
The female slave narrative author had her own sensibilities as well, especially when she had illicit sex with a white man and had been tormented by the shame associated with it. To vindicate herself, to justify her behavior and perhaps the telltale presence of mixed-race children, the slave-mistress-as-narrator had every reason to deny any cooperation or even enjoyment in her relationship. She certainly had no reason to admit to any attraction to or affection for the man who seduced her.
Slave narratives need careful reading. They provide what few other sources can: the slave woman’s perspective on her life and world, with details of personality and perception, time and place, and sequence of events. Harriet’s narrative in particular has passed the test of time and expert scrutiny.
Harriet Ann Jacobs was a pretty little girl who developed into a pretty woman, a circumstance she later deplored. “If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse,” she wrote in Incidents. “That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.”
Harriet was born around 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, to Elijah, a slave carpenter, and Delilah, who belonged to tavern keepers John and Margaret Horniblow. After Delilah’s death in 1819, six-year-old Harriet grew deeply attached to Margaret Horniblow, a kind woman who taught her the elements of reading. Just before Harriet’s twelfth birthday, Margaret died. When her will was executed, Harriet found that instead of being manumitted as she had been promised, she had been deeded to Margaret’s three-year-old cousin, Mary Mathilda Norcom.
Harriet’s little world had crumbled, and her new one soon proved menacing and frightening. Dr. James Norcom, Mary Mathilda’s father, was a callous and sadistic man who persecuted the cook and routinely whipped his slaves. In her first week under his roof, Harriet heard “hundreds of blows fall, in succession, on a human being.” The victim was a field hand who had (rightly) accused his wife of bearing Dr. Norcom’s light-skinned child. In retaliation for the accusation, Norcom whipped the man, then sold both him and his wife, despite the latter’s pleas. The new mother had, Harriet noted, “forgotten that it was a crime for a slave to tell who was the father of her child.”
By the time Harriet was fifteen, Norcom pursued her without respite, whispering “foul words” into her ear and bullying her. He reminded her that he owned her and therefore had a right to her body. Despite her youth and inexperience, Harriet withstood his campaign to deflower her. His vulgarity shocked her, and the prospect of concubinage horrified her. She was also astute enough to have noticed that as soon as Norcom tired of “his victims,” in particular when they gave birth, he sold them away, far from his wife’s jealousy and his neighbors’ snide speculations. Yet Harriet found it difficult to repel him. Though he did not physically force himself on her, he hounded her relentlessly.
At the same time, Harriet had to deal with Mrs. Norcom, the doctor’s much younger second wife, who could not stamp out her husband’s passion for her slave. Mrs. Norcom became Harriet’s nemesis, and their relationship degenerated into the classically tortured one between a betrayed white wife and a hapless slave who shared her home and was, inadvertently, the agent of her betrayal.
With barely controlled rage, Harriet describes Mrs. Norcom as an enervated hypochondriac who lounged in her easy chair and watched slave women whipped till the blood flowed down their lacerated flesh. If dinner was served late, she spat into the cooking pots so the cook and her children could not scrape out and eat the leavings. She separated the family’s cook from her suckling infant. She forced Harriet to trudge barefoot in the snow.
Nothing, Harriet wrote, was more wretched than living in a domestic war zone. “I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress,” she declared.
Dr. Norcom continued to pursue Harriet. He forced her to stand beside him, brushing away flies, as he slowly sipped tea and spelled out for her the delights she would be throwing away if she continued to defy him. And he threatened her with death if she confided so much as a word to Mrs. Norcom. But Mrs. Norcom was already suspicious. For one thing, the doctor had forbidden her to strike the pretty young slave.
Dr. Norcom stepped up his campaign of seduction. He brought his four-year-old daughter to sleep in his bedroom and insisted that Harriet accompany her. This provoked a raging argument between him and Mrs. Norcom, who afterward came to Harriet with a Bible and directed her to kiss “this holy book and swear before God” to tell the truth. With ringing voice, Harriet denied any wrongdoing. Mrs. Norcom sat her down on a stool, stared directly into her eyes and said, “You have taken God’s holy word to testify your innocence. If you have deceived me, beware! … Now tell me all that has passed between your master and you.”
In an impulsive outpouring, Harriet told her everything. Mrs. Norcom flushed and paled, and groaned with such anguish at this violation of her wedding vows and of her dignity that Harriet was moved. “One word of kindness from her would have brought me to her feet,” she recalled.
Mrs. Norcom promised to protect Harriet and managed to put an end to Dr. Norcom’s proposed sleeping arrangements. But as she was “not a very refined woman, and had not much control over her passions,” Mrs. Norcom was devoured by mistrust and hatred. She took to sneaking into Harriet’s room at night and peering down at her. Sometimes she pretended to be Dr. Norcom, whispering into Harriet’s ear to see how she would respond. Before long, Harriet began to fear for her life.
During this nightmarish time, Harriet remained silent. She did not confide in her grandmother, Molly Horniblow, a free townswoman, who on several occasions had tried to buy her. (But Dr. Norcom always refused. Harriet was his daughter Mary Mathilda’s slave, he said, and so he had no legal right to sell her.) When he got Harriet alone, Dr. Norcom said reproachfully, “Did I not take you into the house, and make you the companion of my own children? Did I ever treat you like a negro? I have never allowed you to be punished, not even to please your mistress. And this is the recompense I get, you ungrateful girl!” Yet if Harriet wept, he would say soothingly, “Poor child! Don’t cry! don’t cry! … Poor, foolish girl! You don’t know what is for your own good. I would cherish you. I would make a lady of you. Now go, and think of all I have promised you.”
Harriet did think, and her conclusions were sobering: “Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves [Dr. Norcom himself had sired eleven]… . They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slavetrader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight.” There were a few “honorable exceptions,” when white women forced their husbands to free slaves “towards whom they stood in a ‘parental relation.’” Mrs. Norcom, however, was not one of these women. If Harriet became Norcom’s mistress, it would be only a matter of time before her babies would be sold away from her, and her existence would become even more wretched.
Harriet’s implacable opposition to Norcom did not mean she was immune to other men. She fell in love with a longtime friend, a free-born carpenter who proposed marriage and wanted to buy her. But Harriet knew that the Norcoms would neither agree to sell her nor permit her to be married, except to another slave. When another of their slaves had asked permission to marry a free man of color, Mrs. Norcom had replied, “I will have you peeled and pickled, my lady, if I ever hear you mention that subject again. Do you suppose that I will have you tending my children with the children of that nigger?” Nonetheless, and with great trepidation, Harriet asked Dr. Norcom’s permission to marry. “Do you love this nigger?” he asked abruptly. Harriet’s answer—“Yes, sir,”—provoked an onslaught of abuse, and for the first time, Dr. Norcom struck her and called her “the plague of my life.”
For a week after this, Dr. Norcom watched Harriet in hawklike silence. Then he informed her that he was separating from his wife and moving to Louisiana with a few slaves—she could be one of them. After this plan fell through, he caught Harriet on the street talking to her boyfriend, and beat and cursed her. In despair, Harriet urged her beloved to move to a free state, and she and her brother would follow him there.
But flight proved impossible. Harriet was closely guarded, she had no money and her grandmother strongly opposed the idea. Finally, Harriet abandoned her dreams of joining her carpenter and set out on another path entirely.
Her years with the Norcoms had exposed her to sexual innuendo and the raw facts of life, and she was no longer a naive child. “I knew what I did, and I did it with deliberate calculation,” she wrote later. What she did was become the mistress of a white man she believed could rescue her from the Norcoms by buying her.
Harriet’s lover was Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, an unmarried young lawyer who knew her and her grandmother. Sawyer was increasingly attracted to her, and he often sent her notes. “I was a poor slave girl, only fifteen years old,” Harriet reminds her readers. Before long, “a more tender feeling crept into my heart,” though affection was mixed with “revenge, and calculations of interest … flattered vanity and sincere gratitude for kindness.” Furthermore, “to be an object of interest to a man who is not married, and who is not her master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable situation has left her any pride of sentiment. It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion.”
And so, for this complex of reasons, Harriet began to have sex with Sawyer, though she never mentions when or where this happened. Their affair was not entirely blissful. She worried that her “immorality” would bruise her grandmother Molly’s heart, and hoped the old lady would not find out. Then she discovered she was pregnant, which precipitated a new crisis.
Everyone except Dr. Norcom himself (and of course Samuel Sawyer) would assume Dr. Norcom was the father. But Harriet knew that Norcom would punish her because he was not, while Mrs. Norcom would punish her because she would be sure he was. Harriet hoped to find refuge or at least sympathy at her grandmother’s. Instead, Molly ripped Harriet’s dead mother’s wedding ring from her finger, told her she was a disgrace and shouted, “Go away! and never come to my house again.” Frightened and ashamed, Harriet fled to a friend’s house and confided the whole pitiable story. The unidentified friend intervened with Molly and told her all that Harriet had endured with the Nor-coms. Without really forgiving her, Molly took Harriet back home. But she demanded to know why Sawyer, Harriet’s co-sinner, had destroyed her “one ewe lamb” when he could have taken another slave woman as his paramour. Sawyer assured Molly that he would care for Harriet and their child. He would even try to buy them, he told her.
Dr. Norcom came to visit and allowed Harriet to remain at her grandmother’s only because Mrs. Norcom had banned her from the house. His main concern was to identify Harriet’s lover—had it been the carpenter he had forbidden her to marry? Harriet retorted bitterly, “I have sinned against God and myself, but not against you.”
“Curse you!” Dr. Norcom muttered. “I could grind your bones to powder! You have thrown yourself away on some worthless rascal… . I command you to tell me whether the father of your child is white or black.”
Frightened and confused, Harriet hesitated. “Do you love him?” Norcom persisted. “I am thankful that I do not despise him,” she retorted. This struck Dr. Norcom hard. He threatened to kill her, then promised that if she broke off all contact with her lover, he would provide for her and her baby. Harriet refused, and Dr. Norcom warned, “Very well, then take the consequences of your wayward course. Never look to me for help. You are my slave, and shall always be my slave. I will never sell you, that you may depend upon.”
Baby Joseph was born premature and sickly and, for weeks, teetered between life and death. Harriet, too, had a difficult recovery. Dr. Norcom visited often and reminded her that Joseph was also his slave.
Norcom’s sexual jealousy flamed as fiercely as ever. He kept Harriet away from his adult son, and from his plantation overseer. He accused Harriet of wantonness. He pushed her down a staircase and hacked off her lustrous long hair. He continually insulted and humiliated her. Once, vengefully, he jailed her brother. Meanwhile, her secret lover, Samuel Sawyer, slipped over whenever he could, cuddling Joseph and comforting Harriet. But Sawyer could not even name his son, who remained the property of Dr. Norcom’s daughter.
Four years passed. Harriet returned to the Norcom home, all the while continuing her clandestine affair. Before she turned nineteen, her daughter, Louise Mathilda, was born. Harriet claimed that her feelings for Sawyer never crystallized into the grand passion she had shared with her first sweetheart, though she felt great affection for and gratitude toward him. There was, as well, she wrote, “something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachments.”
Harriet’s second child was proof that she had remained sexually involved with his unknown white rival. Dr. Norcom was furious. “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women,” Harriet wrote. “Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.” She had to sneak Joseph and Louise Mathilda to their baptismal ceremony when Dr. Norcom, who forbade any baptism at all, was out of town.
In 1835, Norcom sent Harriet to his plantation to punish her for refusing to become his concubine. He also announced his plans to toughen up Joseph so he could be sold. Harriet devised an elaborate scheme to flee. She planned to go alone; then Sawyer would buy the children and free them. Her grandmother objected strenuously: “Nobody respects a mother who forsakes her children,” she warned. “If you leave them, you will never have a happy moment.”
Harriet disregarded her grandmother’s counsel. With the help of Sally, a slave friend who agreed that “When dey finds you is gone, dey won’t want de plague ob de chillern,” Harriet made her move. She hid at a friend’s house, then later, at her grandmother’s, in a crawlspace above a storeroom. She was cramped and uncomfortable, but safe from detection, because Dr. Norcom believed she was in the North, and even traveled there to find her and bring her home. Harriet’s deception was sophisticated, and included writing him letters she arranged to have posted from various free states.
Meanwhile, with the help of a slave trader, Sawyer tricked Norcom into selling the children, whom the trader immediately resold to him. To authenticate the appearance of the sale, the children were loaded into the trader’s wagon alongside other sold slaves, who wailed as they were torn away from their wives, husbands and children. The charade ended for Harriet’s family (but not anyone else’s) when Joseph and Louise were safely out of town, and Sawyer had them sneaked back to their grandmother’s. From her crawlspace upstairs, the incarcerated Harriet often caught glimpses of them, but never dared show herself.
Incredibly, Harriet remained in Molly’s attic for seven long years. Meanwhile, Sawyer went on with his life and, in 1837, was elected to Congress as a Democrat. Harriet’s “disappearance” had ended their relationship, and with it, apparently, his promise to free Joseph and Louise. They had been living with Molly since Harriet’s escape, but were still technically his property. Just before he left for Washington, he came to see Molly about them. Harriet risked her safety by revealing herself—but not her hideout—to him, and implored him to manumit the children. “I want nothing for myself,” she said. “All I ask is, that you will free my children, or authorize some friend to do it, before you go.” Sawyer readily agreed to her plea and added that he would try to buy her as well.
However, Sawyer failed to do any of this until he married a white woman. In 1840, after his marriage, he sent for Louise, and later arranged for her to live with his cousins in New York. In 1842, Harriet finally left her hideout and escaped to the North, where she contacted her daughter. In 1843, she arranged for Joseph to join her. From then on she supported herself and her children by working as a seamstress. For the next decade, the family lived as fugitives even though they were on free soil, because the Norcoms, including her legal owner, Mary Mathilda, never ceased pursuing Harriet. In 1852, an abolitionist friend, Cornelia Willis, convinced the Norcoms to sell her. Willis paid them three hundred dollars and manumitted Harriet. Free at last, Harriet began to conceive of the narrative that was finally published in 1861 as Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Harriet spent the rest of her life with her daughter, supporting herself in low-paying jobs and working tirelessly for abolitionist causes. After the Civil War, she and Louise returned to the South to do relief work. Later, they returned to the North. In 1897, Harriet died at the age of eighty-four.
Harriet Jacobs’s exposé of her life as a slave girl is probably the most explicit and articulate published autobiographical account of a slave mistress’s life. Ever since 1861, when it was published, it has generated voluminous and heated debate. In Harriet’s time, abolitionists and defenders of slavery fought over the authenticity and veracity of Harriet’s account. More recently, a host of historians have engaged in interpreting Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl from a plethora of perspectives. The only agreed-upon conclusion is the staggering importance of Harriet’s narrative.
The relentless tension as Norcom stalked her, alternately bullying and cajoling, threatening and promising, is palpable. At the same time, the narrative raises several questions—why did such a ferociously jealous man tolerate his slave’s liaison with another man? Why did he not simply force himself on Harriet and rape her? Why did he single her out for such favored treatment when he lashed and sold off other slave women who displeased him?
In fact, the narrative’s focus on Norcom, whom Harriet steadfastly resisted, deflects attention from Sawyer, her chosen lover and father of her two children. For the same reason, she concentrated much of her venom on Mrs. Norcom, whose vindictiveness included an unending stream of what today we would identify as psychological abuse. Harriet recognized that Mrs. Norcom was a cuckolded wife trapped in a travesty of a marriage. But even decades later, she could summon up little sympathy for her sometime tormentor. She not only portrayed Mrs. Norcom in the most unflattering terms, she also reproduced, apparently verbatim, reams of the most degrading remarks the white woman had heaped on her youthful head. Again, the extravagance of Mrs. Norcom’s cruelties and meannesses diverts readers from wondering how Harriet conducted her duplicitous love life without anyone knowing, or even suspecting.
Harriet’s narrative is rich in remembered conversation between herself and the Norcoms. In these exchanges, she is unfailingly courteous but unyielding, a woman inspired by the highest principles of morality and by her abhorrence of Dr. Norcom’s sinful propositions. Ironically, she tells us far more about Norcom, her never-was lover, than about Sawyer. From beginning to end, Sawyer remains a shadowy figure, and Harriet couches most references to him in the apologetic tone of a woman confessing to a great sin.
Many slave women were very conflicted about sexual intercourse with their owners or other white men. Harriet’s great shame was that Sawyer had not coerced her, though at the same time she believed that giving oneself voluntarily was “less degrading” than being forced into a sexual relationship. She could never admit to loving Sawyer and, even decades after the fact, withheld all the details about their affair. Her main concern was her plea for her readers’ understanding.
As Harriet’s story shows, not all slave women were subjected to brutality to get them into bed. Some voluntarily entered relationships with white men, and for very good and obvious reasons: protection from the worst abuses of slavery; better and easier work assignments; privileges; revenge over a cruel mistress; material rewards; children who might be freed and enjoy an infinitely better life than any slave; and lastly, affection.
Loving the enemy, however, struck many slaves as unpardonable. Harriet, who had committed this “sin,” lacerated herself for it. It was, indeed, a key element in her mistressdom and explains her inability to revel—at least in retrospect—in the erotic pleasures she must have shared with Sawyer, and her refusal to admit to any strong emotional attachment to him.
Then follows the ultimate plea for all slave women sexually involved with white men: “The condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.” Using 19th-century Christian morality and social conventions as her guideline, Harriet judges herself, finds herself guilty and then exonerates herself on the grounds that slavery is by definition an amoral condition.
Harriet’s narrative focused on her experiences as a slave mistress, but it also suggested the wider consequences of illicit relationships between white men and slave women. Harriet’s sexual vulnerability also threatened Mrs. Norcom, who, as a woman, lacked the authority to stop her husband from pursuing slave women. Harriet’s love affair with Samuel Sawyer disturbed her grandmother’s sense of decency. The older woman worried, as well, that it would skew her carefully orchestrated relations with the white community, which tolerated her as a free black. Like all such liaisons, Harriet’s affair with a white man, and the children it produced, called into question the social order that governed life in the slave-owning states.