Slavery, enslaved women, and the archive
This essay is a revised version of my presentation at the conference Now You See Me: Black Women’s Defying Worlds During the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indentured Servitude held at the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam and Framer Framed, in December 2023.
I am not a historian of Black women, but to some extent my work has explored the history of enslaved women, first in Brazil and then more broadly in the Americas and Africa. And this work has focused on four dimensions of the lives of African women and their descendants in the Americas.
I first researched how enslaved women resisted against slavery, through extreme means such as infanticide.
I also I explored the story of Na Agontimé, one of the wives of Agonglo, one of the kings of Dahomey, who was sold into slavery in Brazil.
In my past work, I also studied how enslaved women and their descendants championed the fight for reparations for slavery from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
I have also examined the visual representations of enslaved women in European nineteenth-century illustrated travel accounts in Brazil.
But in my book Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery I am making a first bolder attempt to tell the history of slavery in the Americas by centering enslaved women.
This essay draws on this recent effort by emphasizing what some speakers in this conference (Toby Green, Jessica Marie Johnson, Mariana Candido, Lorelle Semley and others) have already demonstrated through their rich body of work from the sixteenth century to the present.
My argument relies on three premises.
First: it is untenable to insist on the lack of written archival sources on the history African women and their descendants to justify their exclusion from historical narratives.
Second: it is also no longer sustainable to insist on the silence of the archive, given the vast number of explored and unexplored records allowing us to tell the history of enslaved women, which do not require the use of fiction, even though speculation is and has been part of the work of what us historians do for a very long time.
Third, my intervention today also argues that beyond critical fabulation (a term coined by Saidiya Hartman), visual and material culture can also inform and complicate the research and writing of history of African women and their descendants in the Americas.
In the United States, as we know, until the publication of Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a woman? in 1985, male (and mainly white) historians have claimed that sources allowing to tell the history of enslaved women were too scarce.
But in the past two decades, there has been an avalanche of important books and articles focusing on the history of enslaved women. Here I think about the works of the generation of historians to which Deborah Gray White belongs, such as Darlene Clark-Hine, but also the new ones which includes Lorelle Semley, Mariana Candido, Jessica Marie Johnson, and others such as Leslie Schwalm, Annette Gordon-Reed, Jennifer Morgan, Nikki Taylor, Mariza Fuentes, Sasha Turner, Diana Paton, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Vanessa Holden, Juliana Barreto Farias and Maria Helena Machado.
But despite this huge number of new books on enslaved women written most part of the time by Black women historians, many historians continue to draw on the term “critical fabulation” coined by literary scholar Saidiya Hartman in her brilliant essay “Venus in Two Acts,” published in the journal Small Axe, which all of us, including me, have been using over the past years.
Hartman coined the term critical fabulation, which has now been used in the context of many other works to address the violence, the gaps, and the silences of the archive, which for her is indeed a metaphorical archive, as the archive she refers to is not an institution or even a large set of primary sources as historians understand it, it is indeed “The trial of Captain John Kimber for the murder of two female Negro saves, on board the Recovery, African slave ship; Tried at the Admiralty Sessions held at the Old Baily, the 7th of June 1792.”
Therefore, it is not surprising that in this very narrow record, African women transported as commodities to the Americas remained invisible.
Indeed, because of the horrible crime committed on this slave-trading vessel, we came to know Venus’s enslaved name, as Venus was certainly not her African name before being captured and boarded on the Recovery.
In Hartman’s work, critical fabulation can be understood as the use of imagination and storytelling to fill the gaps of the historical archive, especially regarding the history of enslaved people. But her essay actually refers to a metaphorical archive, the one I have been calling #slaveryarchive, because concretely, the archive of Venus’s story is a published 40-page trial written in English.
Surely, the history of people who were victimized, marginalized, and excluded, including women, Black women, and enslaved women, has been often omitted from the historical record. This erasure is in production here, right now, when we as historians fail even to engage, cite, and recognize the work done by women historians.
As this growing number of historians work on the history of African women and their descendants, either enslaved or free (as the papers of this conference confirm), not only it becomes untenable to continue insisting on the motto of the silence of the archive, but also there is no longer any justification to exclude the history of African women and their descendants from historical works.
Yet, critical fabulation is an analytical tool that remains useful for the work of historians. It remains an invitation to interrogate the silences of the records of violence and human atrocities such as the Atlantic slave trade and slavery and especially the violence endured by African women such as Venus and many others.
Beyond critical fabulation, the silences of the archive can open the door to interrogate sources such as visual images and material culture that historians have tried to avoid in the past decades.
We know that in many ways historians and art historians approach artworks differently.
Simply put, the discipline of art history has relied for a long time on the premise that artworks have an autonomous history. Art historians know that visual images do not merely reflect the physical reality, even though visual representations can provide clues about the context in which they were created. Artworks and visual sources are central for the work of art historians, who examine artworks in their materiality, while also analyzing formal elements, themes, styles, symbols, and the contexts of artistic creation and the circulation of artworks and objects. Still, engaging with written and oral primary sources to explain the past is not the central dimension of what art historians do.
Meanwhile, historians draw on written sources (most part of the time) in order to develop arguments to explain the human past. Historians may struggle to analyze the complexity of visual images. When attempting to analyze images as they do with written primary sources, some historians naively expect that images will offer them accurate representations of the past.
Probably, most historians are wary of images as they are of approaches relying on memory as unreliable sources, which is probably why few historians use artworks as primary sources. Likewise, few historians examine material culture (I mean tangible tridimensional objects) in their attempts to understand the past.
Yet, the role of material culture and visual images is attracting greater attention.
Many of us, consciously or not, have been part of this material and visual turn.
I think here of scholars such as Miguel Valerio who has examined visual images and the material culture of monuments and buildings built by enslaved people, Cécile Fromont who has examined watercolors, engravings and objects associated with West Central African and Christian religions, Matthew Rarey who explored the history of amulets carried by enslaved women and men, Toby Green and Colleen Kriger whose works focused on African currencies, Eduardo França Paiva, Mariana Candido and Daniel B. Domingues da Silva who have emphasized in their works the importance of the material world of Africans and their descendants, by exploring the importance of luxury objects owned by enslaved and freed women, as well as patterns of consumption among African women.
My invitation is that we dive together and deeper in this visual and material turn.
Let’s explore three examples that I use in Humans in Shackles.
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The permanent exhibition of the Nantes History Museum in the Château des Ducs de Bretagne in Nantes, France’s largest slave-trading port, features an astonishing watercolor including four diagrams representing the French slave ship La Marie-Séraphique.
We know that some enslaved women did manage to cross the Atlantic Ocean with their offspring. Journals by slave ship captains recorded the death of enslaved children who made the crossing with their mothers. African women gave birth to children during the Middle Passage as well. French captain Joseph Crassou de Médeuil even recorded the name of a stillborn baby birthed on board of the La Rochelle slave vessel Roy Dahomet during the crossing from Ouidah to Cap-Français in Saint-Domingue, the richest French colony in the West Indies in the eighteenth century.
The watercolor probably executed by the ship captain Jean-Baptiste Fautrel-Gaugy and the officer Jean-René L’Hermite, offer detailed views of the slave vessel that sailed first from Nantes to the Loango coast in West Central Africa and then transported 307 enslaved Africans to Cap-Français in 1769.
But a close-up view of the representation of the overcrowded lower deck reveals the image of one enslaved woman suckling her baby on the upper left side of the watercolor.
We do not know if this a depiction of an enslaved mother who was actually on board La Marie-Séraphique, as the image could also have been created to make a general reference to the occasional presence of breastfeeding mothers among the human cargo of slave ships.
Eighteenth-century agents in West African trading posts such as Pierre Simon Gourg, one of the directors of the French fort in Ouidah in the Bight of Benin in the late eighteenth century, reported that European traders avoided purchasing pregnant women or women who have just given birth quote “on the grounds that they are in the way and make the mess on board.”
According to Gourg, African agents who know they could quote “sell women who have just given birth if they present the child always take it away and threaten the mother with killing her if she says she has any and as soon as the mother is sold, if the child is not weaned or if they have no nurse to give the baby they throw him in the fields” to become “food for tigers, wolves and snakes.”
The French officer still insisted that “this is not a fiction, it is a known fact to all who come to the coast.”
But La Marie-Séraphique’s detailed rendering suggests this breastfeeding mother might have been more than just a product of its creator’s imagination.
There are no words to describe the ordeal of enslaved mothers on board slave ships. The Atlantic crossing from the Loango coast to Saint-Domingue lasted sixty days. More than two days of dehydration compromised the mother’s ability to nurse a baby, which also explains the higher levels of mortality among infants during the Middle Passage.
The image of a bondswoman nursing a baby in a floating tomb is one that juxtaposes the certainty of death with the strength of life.
This powerful representation of African women’s resilience during the era of the Atlantic slave trade shows that giving birth and raising enslaved children added further layers of violence to the lives of bondswomen.
Motherhood under slavery was one of the most challenging and tragic experiences faced by enslaved women. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem, stemming from Roman Law and adopted in the Americas, established that newborns inherited the legal status of their mothers. In other words, upon birth, newborns automatically became the property of the enslaved mother’s owner. As put by Jennifer Morgan, for enslaved women in the Americas, quote “reproduction almost immediately took on an entirely new and violent significance.”
When telling the history of African women and their descendants visual images and material culture can help us to better understand their tastes, their way of dressing, the meanings of their clothing, jewelry, and other adornments. These items were more than simple commodities and currencies, they can help us to think about the significance of gold and silver used to produce these necklaces and bracelets, to explore the origin and meanings of the textiles used to produce scarves, shawls, and skirts, to consider who made them, who paid for them, and which items served as models for the creation of these articles.
Like any other sources, visual images also required us to consider who produce these visual representations.
In the case of enslaved women, most visual representations were created by European travelers and artists established in the Americas.
A series of photographs taken by photographer Marc Ferrez in the 1880s, a few years before the abolition of slavery in Brazil, illustrate the various stages of coffee production in plantations of southeastern Brazil. Under the surveillance of overseers in a period when massive flights from Brazilian coffee plantations anticipated the legal abolition of slavery, enslaved people most likely posed for these photographs against their will.
In some pictures, bondspeople display their working tools, while defiantly looking directly at the camera. They challenge us to see them.
Although staged, these photographs provide a wealth of information not only about the coffee industry during the second slavery, but also about the enslaved people who toiled in these plantations.
Organized in gangs enslaved people worked in shifts the entire day under the supervision of overseers and drivers.
Some photographs show how young these enslaved workers were, among whom there were children and pregnant girls, like the one on this picture
We don’t know her name. As this photograph was taken in 1885, three years before the end of slavery in Brazil, very probably this young woman was born in Brazil. We also don’t know her age. If she was born after 1871, and was then about fifteen years old, she may have been benefited from the legislation that declared free enslaved people born after 1871. If so, as many enslaved children born after 1871, she had to stay under the control of her owner until 21 years old. If she was born before the passage of this legislation, she very probably remained enslaved until the abolition of 1888.
Whoever was this girl, in 1885, she got pregnant. The father of her baby could have been a fellow enslaved man, an overseer, her own slave owner, or one of his male children. Was that pregnancy the result of consented relationship or the result of sexual violence? Was she married? We don’t know.
Regardless of using critical fabulation as a framework, and regardless of the fact that any story will always remain incomplete, as historians, visual and material culture can provide us with additional layers to complicate and enrich the history of enslaved women.
Like many nameless enslaved young girls, we may never know the answer to these questions. Still, the young woman whose image was captured in this photograph invites us to ask these questions.
She forces us to see her now.
Like many other enslaved women, she invites us to tell her story.