The sexual abuse of black men under American slavery.

Abstract

I n 1787 a n e n s l av e d m a n i n 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.” Scholars have suggested that rape can serve as a metaphor for enslavement—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.” 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