The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861

Abstract

AS A YOUNG WOMAN, NANCY WILLIAMS JOINED OTHER ENSLAVED PEOPLE and cou'tin' couples who would slip 'way to an cabin a few miles from the Virginia plantation where she lived. Deep in the woods, away from slaveholding eyes, they held secret parties, where they amused themselves dancing, performing music, drinking alcohol, and courting. A religious woman in her old age, Williams admitted only reluctantly to her interviewer that she had enjoyed the secular pleasures of dressing up and going to these outlaw dances. Dem de day's when me'n de devil was runnin roun in de depths o' hell. No, don' even wanna talk 'bout it, she said. However, Williams ultimately agreed to discuss the outlaw parties she had attended, reasoning, Guess I didn' know no better den, and remembering with fondness that, after all, [d]em dances was somepin. (1) Musicians played fiddles, tambourines, banjos, and two sets o' [cow] bones for the dancers. Williams was a gifted and enthusiastic dancer; she would get out dere in de middle o' de flo' jes' a-dancin'; me an Jennie, an' de devil. Dancin' wid a glass o' water on my head an' three boys a bettin' on me. Williams often won this contest by dancing the longest while balancing the glass of water on her head without spilling a drop. She [j]es' danced ole Jennie down. Like the other women in attendance, Williams took pride in her outfits at these illicit parties, and she went to great trouble to make them. She adorned one dress with ruffles and dyed others yellow or red. Her yellow dress even had matching yellow shoes; they were ill-fitting, as many bondpeople's wooden brogans were, and sho' did hurt me, but, animated by her own beautiful self-presentation, dat ain' stop me f'om dancin'. By illuminating a part of everyday life that bondpeople kept very hidden, Nancy Williams's account of attending outlaw slave parties helps uncover one part of the story of enslaved women's lives: the role that the body played in slaveholders' endeavors to control their labor force and in black resistance to bondage in the nineteenth-century plantation South. Despite planters' tremendous effort to prevent such escape, enslaved women and men sporadically slip[ped] 'way to take pleasure in their own bodies. (2) At the heart of the process of enslavement was a geographical impulse to locate bondpeople in plantation space. Winthrop D. Jordan found that it was confinement, [m]ore than any other single quality, that differentiated slavery from servitude in the early years of American slavery's formation. Not only a power or labor relation, [e]nslavement was captivity. Accordingly, black mobility appears to have been the target of more official and planter regulations than other aspects of slave behavior. (3) Slaveholders strove to create controlled and controlling landscapes that would determine the uses to which enslaved people put their bodies. But body politics in the Old South were not dictated by a monologue as slaveholders wished. To the contrary, slave owners' attempts to control black movement--and, indeed, most aspects of black bodily experience--created a terrain on which bondpeople would contest slaveholding power. Bondpeople, who had their own plans for their bodies, violated the boundaries of space and time that were intended to demarcate and consolidate planters' patriarchal power over plantation households. Their alternative negotiation and mapping of plantation space might best be called, in Anne Godlewska and Neil Smith's phrase, a geography. Enslaved people's rival was not a fixed spatial formation, for it included quarters, outbuildings, woods, swamps, and neighboring farms as opportunity granted them. Where slaveholders' mapping of the plantation was defined by rigid places for its residents, the rival was characterized by motion: the secret movement of bodies, objects, and information within and around plantation space. Together, but differently, women and men took flight to the very woods and swamps that planters intended to be the borders of the plantation's geography of containment. …