When Mammy Lies: The Everyday Resistance of Slave Women in Martin Delany's Blake

Abstract

When Mammy Lies:The Everyday Resistance of Slave Women in Martin Delany's Blake Andy Doolen (bio) African American authors from the antebellum era created black lives that mattered—heroic, upright, fully human individuals who hungered for freedom and who risked their lives in the pursuit of it. In the only novel that Martin Delany would ever write, a brokenhearted Henry Blake sows the seeds of rebellion after his wife, Maggie, is sold away to a Cuban planter. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of Blake; or, The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba (1859) is its stirring depiction of black revolutionaries who are fighting for their destiny as a free people. Published in book form for the first time in 1970, Delany's recovered serial novel meshed perfectly with the era's Black Arts movement, echoing its calls for black artistic and political freedoms, by any means necessary, and giving historical depth to the movement's trenchant critique of slavery.1 No subject has been more important to critics of the novel, myself included, than Delany's grand vision of a revolutionary movement spreading throughout the black Atlantic.2 The black men in Blake who embody the defiant manhood of David Walker, Nat Turner, and Toussaint Louverture receive nearly all of the critical attention. The militancy of Henry Blake, Placido, and their comrades repudiated a belief shared by whites on both sides of the slavery question during the period—that generations of bondage had made slaves submissive, dependent on white people, and utterly unprepared for the obligations of citizenship. The rebellion being planned in the novel promises to be visible, organized, and violent. Historical researchers have documented that enslaved men engaged in this kind of resistance at much higher rates compared to enslaved women. Scholarship tends to [End Page 1] favor these direct actions over other kinds of slave resistance because, among other things, they produced tangible evidence that can be found in archives. Newspaper accounts, death notices, correspondence, laws, bills of sale, and other documents continue to assist researchers in reconstructing a historical record of known incidents of slave resistance.3 Slave women specialized in clandestine acts of resistance such as sabotage, lying, theft, truancy, and covert communications.4 The evidence of their opposition tends to be more ephemeral or intangible and thus much harder for researchers to locate in the archive than the evidence of armed insurrections. This helps to explain why so many astute critics have ignored the everyday resistance of slave women in Blake. So, too, does the prevailing view of Delany as a militant steeped in a masculine black nationalism, which has habituated us to overlook his investigation of gender and power in antebellum culture. Yet his prolific body of work provides ample evidence of his careful attention to gender issues. In fact, as Gabrielle Foreman observes, he supported women's rights and cared deeply about the experiences of black women. In Foreman's estimation, Delany was even "more proactive on issues of gender than Frederick Douglass," who always has stood out for his support for women's rights.5 The critical focus on a rebellion writ large, and led by men, has veiled our view of the everyday resistance of slave women in Blake. Characters such as Mammy Judy, Ailcey, and Rachel opposed the slave regime in the hidden and indirect ways that were typical of women's experiences in the plantation South. To that end, my article traces Delany's literary intensity back to fraught scenes of interrogation in which women conspire against agitated slaveholders. Embracing a dangerous and noble undertaking, Mammy Judy, Ailcey, and Rachel, in particular, attempt to conceal from their inquisitors the whereabouts of Henry Blake and little Joe. Slipping and ducking questions with verbal acuity, the women weave together truth and fiction, deftly camouflage the escape of their loved ones, and ultimately divert attention away from growing resistance in the slave quarters. By acting the part of happy and loyal slaves, the women stealthily wrest discursive power away from their inquisitors. Delany does not reduce these women to simple and silent objects of pity, which was the prevailing tendency in...