Psychology of Slaves Raising White Babies Scholarly Article

Colonial-era fictional and not-fictional descriptions of slave maternity offering conflicting accounts of the attitudes of slave mothers toward their children. While abolitionists tended to portray slave mothers equally wholly selfless, doting, and maternal, pro-slavery writers described slave mothers every bit negligent and cruel. The debate over the nature of slave motherhood was especially relevant to the Caribbean, where vicious working conditions, disease, and malnutrition impeded slave reproduction. Plantation owners blamed slave women for their failure to reproduce, accusing them of practicing birth control and procuring abortions. In some cases, planters defendant slave women of committing infanticide.

Information technology is difficult to ascertain merely how often the latter occurred. There is certainly evidence to advise that Caribbean planters' allegations of slave women killing their infants were exaggerated.1 On the other hand, "the infant mortality rate from natural causes was undoubtedly high in the Caribbean area, but the unusually high expiry rate within the commencement week, non satisfactorily explained every bit caused by tetanus, may signify that women used preparations which effected patently natural death."two One of the more than famous stories of slave infanticide in the Caribbean area is that of Sabina Park, a Jamaican slave who was brought to trial for killing her immature child. Park claimed that she "had worked enough for buckra (master) already and that she would not be plagued to raise the child… to work for white people."iii

The obvious response to slave infanticide is to conceptualize it as an act of desperation, a lamentable act, or an deed of altruism, in the sense that information technology was intended to save enslaved children from a life of hard labor, degradation, and physical, sexual, and mental abuse.

But what if slave infanticide, in all its horror, was an expression of resistance? To conceptualize it this fashion places bureau dorsum in the easily of the slave women who killed their children, because it assumes that their decision was actively, discursively antagonistic and insurrectionary.

Reactions to slave infanticide varied co-ordinate to one's behavior most the nature of slaves and the justice of slaveholding. Co-ordinate to Christopher Peterson, "for racist ideologues, slave infanticide is further proof of an bestiality inherent in black motherhood: a propensity to violence from which white motherhood is exempt. For abolitionists, [it] emerges both equally proof of slavery's evils and of a female parent's dear for her children."4 Indeed, in keeping with the viewpoint Peterson attributes to abolitionists, the obvious response to slave infanticide is to anticipate information technology every bit an act of desperation, a sad act (which it certainly was), or an act of altruism—altruism in the sense that it was intended to salvage enslaved children from a life of hard labor, deposition, and physical, sexual, and mental abuse. But what if slave infanticide, in all its horror, was an expression of resistance? To conceptualize it this way places agency back in the hands of the slave women who killed their children, because it assumes that their decision was actively, discursively antagonistic and insurrectionary.

An image depicting cane cutters in Jamaica after formal slavery was ended, mid-19th century. More than than half of the slaves in the region were female.

The extremely grave nature of this subject affair merits an unusually high degree of respect and sensitivity in one's approach to it. History is not a neutral discipline. Considering infanticide as a course of resistance is important in telling the story of Caribbean area slave women as total people, as rational actors who fabricated calculated decisions with rebellion in mind. Drawing on colonial-era accounts of slave maternity, resistance theory, and recent work on the sociology of slavery, the key aim of this paper is to explore the equation of infanticide with resistance, with a geographical focus on the colonies of Jamaica, Barbados, and Saint-Domingue.5 All of the historical sources cited are from the mid-eighteenth century to 1834, when Britain abolished slavery in its colonies. Sources pertaining to Saint-Domingue are from prior to the slave rebellion of 1791 that culminated in the abolition of slavery in the colony.

Considering infanticide as a form of resistance is important in telling the story of Caribbean slave women every bit total people, as rational actors who made calculated decisions with rebellion in mind.

Extant accounts of Caribbean slave life are rife with racist assumptions about the supposed negligence and selfishness of black mothers. For example, many plantation owners accused slave women of procuring abortions with the intention of continuing to have promiscuous sex, unhindered by pregnancy.6 White observers such as plantation owners, overseers, and doctors believed that slave women'south alleged promiscuity fabricated them peculiarly prone to crabs disease. They often blamed slave miscarriages on the medicines slave women took (or supposedly took) to treat venereal disease.7 The logical implication of this belief was that if slave women were not then sexually indiscriminate, they would not need to take miscarriage-inducing medicines. Indeed, plantation owners found it more than convenient to blame slave women for their failure to produce healthy offspring than to take responsibility for the sorry atmospheric condition that undoubtedly contributed to complications in pregnancy and childbirth. Physicians in Saint-Domingue accused slave mothers of causing mal de mâchoir (or 'soreness of the jaw,' cases of which take been retrospectively diagnosed as tetanus and neonatal tetany) among infants.8 This, of course, functioned to bolster the claim that enslaved women were neglectful, evil, unfit mothers.9 According to the French writer of a 1790 pro-slavery pamphlet, they "destroy their own fruit, or they practice infanticide in order to alive without moderation."x

These derogatory cultural images of enslaved mothers are relevant to the analysis of slave infanticide considering they colored white people's perception of slaves' reproductive habits. It was a difficult task, determining if a documented infanticide case was valid, and not a natural death acquired by poor living conditions. Every bit consequence, there is no clear consensus amid historians on the issue. In 1796, a slave named Mary Thomas of the Newton Estate in Barbados was accused of killing her newborn infant. Historian Hilary McD. Beckles describes the event by restating Wood'due south claim that Mary Thomas killed her infant out of anger at her white lover, the plantation bookkeeper.11 Beckles does not question Wood in this paraphrased account. Conversely, in her summary of the Mary Thomas example, historian Tara A. Inniss casts doubt on Wood's accusation of infanticide, adding, "Enslaved midwives were easy targets for arraign should the child succumb to disease or sudden death in the first days of life."12 Inniss and Beckles' differing interpretations of Forest's account demonstrate the challenge of discerning fact from fiction in records of infanticide. Information technology is most impossible to tell if Mary Thomas was in fact guilty of killing her baby.

Even those who believe that slave infanticide was common admit that this supposition is based on some speculation. In the words of Barbara Bush-league, who has written extensively on gender and slavery in the Caribbean, studying Caribbean slave infanticide requires "informed speculation and creative approaches in history." 13 A perfect case of such a speculative, artistic approach lies in James A. Delle'southward assay of birth and death records of the Radnor Plantation in Jamaica. Records from the years of 1822-1825 list viii baby deaths for which the crusade of decease is unnoted. Delle speculates that some of these were infanticides.14 Bush is one of the more vocal proponents of the argument that slave women often proficient infanticide. In an articled titled "Hard Labour: Women, Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies," she notes that Caribbean populations grew significantly after emancipation, fifty-fifty though the standard of living hardly improved in almost places. To her, this indicates that the "nature of slavery and the responses of slave women to their bondage must also be considered."15 Bush notes that slave infanticide occurred in the antebellum United States, where slaves lived under generally better atmospheric condition than in the Caribbean area. Thus, it was probably likewise practiced in the Caribbean.16 This statement is supported by the fact that, in full general, Caribbean area slave populations were more successful than those in the United states of america in preserving parts of West African cultural traditions. In many traditional West African cultures, newborn babies are not considered fully human being until eight days after birth.17 According to Bush-league, the possibility that slave women committed infanticide through "letting" their immature infants die (equally opposed to violently killing them) is likely.18

Numerous books and articles on slavery in Saint-Domingue state that infanticide contributed to the colony'south low fertility charge per unit just do not provide whatever concrete examples of recorded infanticides.19 Londa L. Schiebinger's Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World is a notable exception. Schiebinger cites a Saint-Domingue physician'due south account of a woman who killed her two children to "steal them abroad from slavery and the discovery of the bodies of thirty-one infants at a Saint-Domingue plantation, some of which had most likely been killed.20 On the aforementioned plantation where the bodies were discovered, an infant said to accept died of tetanus was found to take a ball of "vegetable matter" blimp in its throat.21 On another Saint-Domingue plantation, a midwife admitted to killing lxx newborn babies. "See if I deserve expiry!" she reportedly said. "It is a shameful custom to heighten children into slavery."22 Reports of Jamaican slave infanticide include those found in the nascency and decease records of the Mesopotamia Plantation and the same Sabrina Park case.23

In sum, the lack of large-scale information on the prevalence of slave infanticide in the British and French Caribbean makes it a difficult topic of report. Planters' racist misconceptions about black female sexuality and maternity taint the extant records to which historians have access, calculation another layer of difficulty. Still, it is likely that just as in the United States, slave infanticide was not unknown in the Caribbean area. Perchance the significance of slave infanticide lies not in its frequency, but in the social meanings with which it was embedded.24 With that in mind, the next step in telling the story of infanticide in Barbados, Jamaica, and Saint-Domingue is discerning the meanings that slave women prescribed to the act of killing their infants.

About of the scholarly literature on slave infanticide focuses on slavery in the antebellum United States.25 In this literature, recorded cases of infanticide are often dismissed as anomalies and followed past lengthy declarations of slave women's maternal aptitude.26 The result of this is to imply that infanticide excludes the possibility of parental love, and vice-versa. The truth is somewhat more complex. As Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson explain in A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America, slaves' statements on infanticide indicate that the killing of one's children was often conceived of as an altruistic act and that enslaved women who killed their children oftentimes did so out of love.27 Connected on Next Folio »

bettynesecale.blogspot.com

Source: http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/893/infanticide-as-slave-resistance-evidence-from-barbados-jamaica-and-saint-domingue