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The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery Author(s): THOMAS A. FOSTER Source: Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 20, No. 3, INTERSECTIONS OF RACE AND

SEXUALITY (SEPTEMBER 2011), pp. 445-464 Published by: University of Texas Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41305880 Accessed: 20-11-2015 01:26 UTC

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The Sexual Abuse of Black Men

under American Slavery

THOMAS A. FOSTER DePaul University

In 1787 an enslaved man in Maryland raped a free black woman. The story comes to us from the female victim in the incident, Elizabeth Amwood. One white man, William Holland, had her “Pull up her Close and Lie Down he then Called a Negrow Man Slave” “and ordered him to pull Down his Britches and gitt upon the said Amwood and to bee grate with her.” A fourth individual in this horrific scene, a white man named John Pettigrew, operating with Holland, pointed a pistol at the unnamed enslaved man and Elizabeth Amwood. All the while, Holland taunted them both, asking if it “was in” and “if it was sweet.” Afterward, William “went up into the Company and Called for Water to wash his hand, saying he had bin putting a Mare to a horse.”1

Scholars have suggested that rape can serve as a metaphor for enslave- ment – thus applying to both men and women who were enslaved. As Aliyah I. Abdur- Rahman argues, “The vulnerability of all enslaved black persons to nearly every conceivable violation produced a collective ‘raped’ subjectivity.”2 The standard scholarly interpretation of how slavery affected black manhood is perhaps best captured by the comments of one former slave, Lewis Clarke, who declared that a slave “can’t be a man” because he

I would like to thank all those who helped with the development of this article, including Ramon A. Gutierrez, Mathew Kuefler, and the participants in the history of the intersection of race and sexuality conference hosted by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the University of California, San Diego. I would also like to thank Estelle Freedman and Margaret Storey for feedback on earlier versions of this article. 1 Petitions for William Holland, March 1787, Governor and Council, Pardon Papers, box 4, folder 47, Maryland State Archives (hereafter MdSA). See also Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 85. 2 Aliyah I. Abdur- Rahman argues: “More than simply a condition of black women’s experi- ence under slavery, rape serves as a useful paradigm for assessing and describing the position and experience of black people in total under slavery’s brutal regime” (“‘The Strangest Freaks of Despotism’: Queer Sexuality in Antebellum African American Slave Narratives,” African American Review 40, no. 2 [2006]: 230-31).

Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 201 1 © 2011 by the University of Texas Press, PO Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

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446 Thomas A. Foster

could not protect his female kin from being sexually assaulted by owners and overseers.3 Clark’s concern, the rape and sexual assault of black women and girls, has been well documented by the historical record. Thelma Jennings and others have analyzed the literal sexual assault of enslaved women in a range of contexts.4 Physical sexual abuse of women and girls under slavery ranged from acts of punishment to expressions of desire and from forms of forced reproduction to systems of concubinage. Slavery violated the masculinity of black men who were denied the ability to protect vulnerable female dependents. According to Deborah Gray White, “Those who tried to protect their spouses were themselves abused.”5 The emasculating psychic toll, White further argued, could have led men to eschew monogamy or resist marriage altogether.6

The rape of Elizabeth Amwood reveals that black manhood under slavery was also violated in other ways that are less easily spoken of (then and now), namely, the sexual exploitation of enslaved men.7 The historical sexual assault of men and boys is well known, if mostly unarticulated.8 The scholarship on early America shows us numerous instances of rape and sexual assault of men and boys. Ramon Gutierrez has argued that individuals of the Native American third sex, or berdaches, were frequendy prisoners of war used for

3 Lewis Clarke, “Leaves from a Slave’s Journal of Life,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, 20 and 27 October 1842, reprinted in Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters , Speeches, Interviews , and Autobiographies , ed. John W. Blassingame (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 156-58. 4 Thelma Jennings, ‘”Us Colored Women Had to Go Through a Plenty’: Sexual Exploita- tion of African-American Slave Women,”/o«rM/ of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (1990): 45-74. 5 Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985; New York: Norton, 1999), 146. See also, for example, Daina Ramey Berry, “Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe”: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 81. 6 White, Ar’n’t I a Woman ?, 147. 7 The rape of adult men in conflict and war today, for example, goes underreported and is much less discussed than rape of women as a weapon of war. In 2005, for example, in eastern Congo and northern Uganda, rape of boys and men was a notable feature of the conflicts there. This has been documented by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. See, for example, its 2005 Annual Report for Congo (Dem. Rep. of ), available online at http://www.amnestyusa.org/annualreport.php?id=ar&yr=2005&c=CC)D (accessed 1 August 2010). Also muted in discussions of the rape and sexual assault of men is prison rape. See, for example, Human Rights Watch, “No Escape: Male Rape in U.S. Prisons,” 2001, available online at http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2001/prison/report.html (accessed 1 August 2010). On the history of sex and sexual abuse behind bars, see, for example, Regina Kunzel, Criminal Intimacy: Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). More often than not, rape of men in prison is the subject of derisive humor in popular culture masking a deep discomfort and homophobia. But dismissive humor also hides the deeper threat that male rape exposes – the penetrability and vulnerability of men.

Michael Scarce, Male on Male Rape: The Hidden Toll of Stigma and Shame (New York: Plenum, 1997).

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