"Dey-dey-dey" This sound, made by the body possessed by Ezili Danto, a voodoo iwa associated with the Virgin Mary, represents the wordlessness of generations of Haitian women. (Mcarthy Brown 229) The presence of these women is most noticeable by its absence from the standard historical narratives. This absence is generally the case when dealing with women from minority groups, especially if those women were illiterate. So perhaps it is unsurprising that when looking at the history of St. Domingue right before and during the Revolution, women do not seem to be part of the story. Searching between the lines however, reveals that enslaved women faced many obstacles not faced by their male counterparts, and avenues of freedom for women were closing in the years leading up to the Revolution. Faced with these challenges, women empowered themselves in a variety of ways. Chief among those was religion, which served as a means of female empowerment both before and during the revolution, and was one of the major ways through which women contributed to the insurgency.
At the time of the revolution, the majority of the field gangs that did some of the hardest manual labor were women. The more skilled jobs were open primarily to men, depriving enslaved women of one of the few ways of gaining a better position within the slave hierarchy. (Geggus 261) Women often used sexual liasons with white men as tools for advancement, and means of gaining manumission for oneself and/or one’s children. Records show that the majority of manumissions were of women and their children, often by the white master who had produced those children with the woman being freed. In the years leading up to the revolution, it became much harder for masters to manumit their slaves, thereby closing off women’s primary avenue for gaining freedom. (Geggus 9) Records reveal that manumissions dropped from 739 to 256 between 1785 and 1789. The percentage of manumissions that were women also dropped, from sixty-five to sixty-three percent. These two figures combined meant a sharp decline in a woman’s chances of being manumitted. (Geggus 10) Furthermore, sexual liasons with white men did not guarantee material advancement or freedom: From a master’s perspective, any child born to a female slave was merely an addition to his property. Given the slave hierarchy, enslaved women were not in a position where they could refuse a white man’s advances, without fear of severe consequences. Most slave-master sexual relationships, if not all, can be classified as rape. It is impossible to measure the ways in which living with constant rape or fear of rape affected enslaved women, but one can safely assume that the effect was traumatizing.
Many women were also employed as domestics, a position that not only saved them from the physical hardships of working in the field, but also put them into close contact with white families. This close contact meant that one was under constant observation, but also could result in the formation of close relationships. Like enslaved women in long-term relationships with white men, domestic servants were traditionally in a position to hope that their emotional closeness with their masters would one day result in manumission for themselves and/or their children, a hope that was effectively squashed leading up to the Revolution, when manumission was made more difficult. (Geggus 9) This is not to say that emotional relationships between master families and domestics were merely the result of calculating on the part of the latter: On the contrary, during the Haitian Revolution many women employed as domestics risked their own lives in order to save the lives of their master families. The women of the Clement family, for example, were saved by a faithful female slave. (“The First Days of the Slave Insurrection”, 52,53) The deposition of Marie Jeanne Jouette, who was a prisoner of the insurgents from 1791 to 1793, records how her female slaves hid her in their huts, and one of her female slaves successfully petitioned Jean-Francois for her release, upon which she was invited to stay with “citizeness Marie Rose, a former slave of citizen Lacombe” (Popkin 158). The deposition of the Abbe De La Haye, cure of Dondon, taken in 1792, records his female slave, Francoise, as reproaching some of the slave insurgents “for the thefts and murders they had committed”, and being transported by Jeannot to the camp at La Tannerie as punishment. (Popkin 160)
No comments:
Post a Comment