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The Trauma of Chattel Slavery: a Womanist Perspective Women on Georgia in Early American Times

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The Trauma of Chattel Slavery: a Womanist Perspective Women on Georgia in Early American Times Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Theses Department of English Summer 8-1-2012 The Trauma of Chattel Slavery: A Womanist Perspective Women on Georgia in Early American Times Dionne Blasingame Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses Recommended Citation Blasingame, Dionne, "The Trauma of Chattel Slavery: A Womanist Perspective Women on Georgia in Early American Times." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2012. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_theses/138 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE TRAUMA OF CHATTEL SLAVERY: A WOMANIST PERSPECTIVE WOMEN ON GEORGIA IN EARLY AMERICAN TIMES by DIONNE BLASINGAME Under the Direction of Carol P. Marsh-Lockett ABSTRACT This thesis explores the psycho-socio-cultural dynamics that surrounded black womanhood in antebellum Georgia. The goal is twofold: first, to examine how slave narratives, testimonies, and interviews depicted the plight of enslaved black women through a womanist lens and second, to discover what political and socio-cultural constructions enabled the severe slave institution that was endemic to Georgia. Womanist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and trauma theory are ad- dressed in this study to focus on antebellum or pre-Civil War Georgia. INDEX WORDS: Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Keckley, Margaret Walker, Alice Walker, Fannie Kemble, Georgia, Black women, Trauma, Trauma theory, Womanism, Black womanism, Africana womanism, Exploitation, Psychoanalytics THE TRAUMA OF CHATTEL SLAVERY: A WOMANIST PERSPECTIVE WOMEN ON GEORGIA IN EARLY AMERICAN TIMES by DIONNE BLASINGAME A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2012 Copyright by Dionne Leshon Blasingame 2012 THE TRAUMA OF CHATTEL SLAVERY: A WOMANIST PERSPECTIVE WOMEN ON GEORGIA IN EARLY AMERICAN TIMES by DIONNE BLASINGAME Committee Chair: Carol P. Marsh-Lockett Committee: Elizabeth West Nancy Chase Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University August 2012 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to acknowledge the professors who took an interest in my academic struggle for knowledge and understanding – those who played pivotal roles in my development: Dr. Elizabeth West, Dr. Carol Marsh-Locket, Dr. Nancy Chase, and Dr. Kameelah Martin Samuel. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................ iv INTRODUCTION: WOMANISM, TRAUMA, AND ENSLAVED BLACK WOMEN IN GEORGIA…………………………………………………………………………......…………1 1 ASSESSING FOR TRAUMA IN THE LIVES OF ENSLAVED WOMEN IN EARLY AMERICA…………………………………………………………………………………..........9 2 WOMANIZING THE BLACK FEMALE CONDITION: THE CONCEPTS OF WO- MANISM…..…………………………………………………………………………….….......32 3 ANALYZING THE TYPES OF TRAUMA INTRINSIC WITHIN THE LEGAL SYS- TEM OF GEORGIA: THE SOCIO-CULTURAL AND POLITICO-LEGISLATIVE DIF- FERENCES OF ENSLAVED BLACK FEMALE SUBJUGATION………………………..39 CONCLUSION: FINALIZING THE LEGACIAL CONNECTIONS BETWEEN WO- MANISM, TRAUMA, AND ENSLAVED BLACK WOMEN IN GEORGIA…………......56 WORKS CITED……………..……………………………………..…………………………..61 1 INTRODUCTION: WOMANISM, TRAUMA, AND ENSLAVED BLACK WOMEN IN GEORGIA Trauma has long played a vital role in literature and testimony. From classical nineteenth- century Freudian psychoanalytics to twentieth-century womanist theoretical perspectives to twenty-first century Caruthian trauma theory, people’s experience with trauma remains a signifi- cant literary consideration. Perhaps nowhere has the literary connection to trauma surfaced as strongly as in the slave narratives and the slave testimonies of Georgia. In Women, Violence, and Testimony in the Works of Zora Neale Hurston, Diana Miles argues that “there is an inextricable link between trauma, survival and the ethical imperative to give testimony [to slavery]” (48). As we consider the South in the context of “trauma, survival and the ethical imperative” that gave testimony to slavery, the scholar and reader must remain aware that the South underwent two pivotal transitions during early American times. In general, the two major shifts in the South were socio-cultural and politico-legislative, and these shifts cemented this connection between trauma, testimony, and slavery in literature. Socio-cultural events refer to the social and cultural factors and/or structures that evolved over time during chattel slavery. Politico-legislative occurrences address the political and legislative laws that governed and affected human liberties over time within the system of slavery. The first set of circumstances occurred on the plantation when the slave-driven Southern economy de- pended increasingly upon cotton, rice, tobacco, and indigo production. Small agricultural farms turned into large expansive plantations, and cotton and rice soon overtook many of the staple crops of the American South. As the plantation economy developed, the need for slave labor in- creased exponentially, and the subjugation of enslaved Africans in America became endemic. In Africans in America, historians Charles Johnson, Patricia Smith, and the WGBH Series Research 2 Team state that once the “powerful Virginia landowners began to realize that enslaving Africans made good economic sense [,]…in 1641… English colon[ies] in North America [began] to rec- ognize slavery as a legal institution” (41). These Southern planters viewed slavery and trauma in a fundamentally different manner than did the colonists before them, and many of these planta- tion slave owners invariably prioritized wealth-building practices over human relationships. In The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), the English naturalist Charles Darwin traces human evolution and details the differences among human races. According to Darwin, blacks were inferior to whites. Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, provided another inter- pretation, later known as eugenics, between 1865 and 1869. Galton argued that physical traits and mental qualities (genius and talent) were inherited among generations (races) of people. Ac- cording to Galton, blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Coupled with a eugenic and Darwi- nistic view of African descendants, this socio-cultural occurrence culminated in the marginaliza- tion of enslaved persons and the subsequent trauma inflicted upon them in the South. Thus, the institution of slavery underscored the contrast between the socio-cultural landscapes of black communities and those of white communities in the American South. By the end of the eighteenth century, a second wave of racial delineations had occurred, this time from a politico-legislative perspective, as much of the South’s race-related laws cen- tered on infringement of basic human and civil rights of enslaved and free-born blacks. In the General Index to Papers and Annual Reports of the American Historical Association, 1884- 1914, David Matteson argues nowhere was this encroachment as strongly exhibited as in the state of Georgia (184-185). By establishing the Slave Codes of Georgia in 1848, early Georgia settlers ignored the anti-slavery statues on the importation of slaves, held open slave auctions despite the anti-slavery laws, banned manumission of black slaves, tried free blacks under the 3 same tenets as slaves, banned the education of all blacks, and prohibited communication between free blacks and enslaved blacks (152-153). The politico-legislative shift allowed for a stricter, more subjugated slave environment in Georgia. In the seminal text Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, Ira Berlin, a prominent historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American slavery, states that, in Georgia, “slavery grew as never before, and few slaves gained their freedom” (12). In 1780, Virginia had sanctioned Georgian slavehold- ers by exempting the States’ prohibition on imported slaves (466). Georgia planters and slave- holders seemed “stark Mad after Negroes” and began importing slaves in vast numbers, especial- ly in the coastal regions of Georgia (144). Often blacks had the demographic majority, and, in many ways, coastal Georgia and its large rice-cultivating plantations closely resembled the slave practices and demographics of the West Indies. Moreover, Georgia preferred African slaves above all others: “By the 1760s, Georgia planters…imported their slaves directly from Africa, and most slaves were ‘African born’” (422). According to Berlin, Georgia’s slaves had changed not only in number but also in kind during the 1770s, and “some 4,000 African slaves arrived annually in the low country” (144). According to Georgia Encyclopedia, Georgia’s “slavehold- ers controlled not only the best land and the vast majority of personal property in the State but also the State political system. In 1850 and 1860 more than two-thirds of all State legislators were slaveholders….[A]lmost a third of the State legislators were planters.…[E]ven without the cooperation of nonslaveholding white male voters, Georgia slaveholders could dictate the State’s political [or legislative] path.”1 The results
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