Sarah McCall DeLaRosa
 

Research Post 2: Motherhood in American Slave Literature

            I have been feeling out topics for my Master’s Thesis, and the slave literature that we have read in class—the narratives and the poetry—grabbed my interest. My first research post covered the topic of American Slave Literature broadly so that I could get an understanding of the field, and for research post number two I have decided to narrow that focus. I have chosen to research the concept of Motherhood in American Slave Literature, because my infant daughter brought this perspective close to my heart. I am investigating the presence and treatment of motherhood in American slave literature because it is something I can deeply relate to in a region of literature otherwise very remote to me.

            At first, my searches of the UHCL library’s databases turned up articles of a mainly historical, anthropological vein. The two articles I have chosen to represent those findings are “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies” [1] (2001) by Marie Jenkins Schwartz, and “Slave Mothers and Freed Children: Emancipation and Female Space in Debates on the ‘Free Womb’ Law, Rio de Janeiro, 1871”[2] (1996) by Martha Abreu. Schwartz’s article focuses on how slave families attempted to create as normal of a life as they could for their children. She details how they worked together to provide supplemental food for their family—the children doing much of the farming while the parents were at work on the plantation. Also issues of clothing, protecting children from the horrors of slavery, community, and many other facets of the domestic lives of slaves are explained in Schwartz’s article. She gives us, as she explains in her introduction, a look at the slaves’ quarters—their life after the work day is done. This article is very informative and provides a lot of depth and detail in an area of slave history that seems lacking in research.

            Abreu’s topic, admittedly, comes from Brazil, but nevertheless I spent a good deal of time studying her article as it was also very interesting. Like Schwartz’s, this article treats the historical side of slavery and not its literature but I used it to build my understanding of the topic. The Free Womb law that Abreu writes about was an attempt to phase out slavery in its last stronghold in the Americas, Brazil. The law declared that any child born of a slave would no longer be a slave himself but free. Not only that, but he would be allowed to remain with his mother (the slave), and be provided for by the master until he was eight years old. From eight years to twenty-one, the freed boy was required to be provided paid work from his mother’s master. The law, however, was poorly enforced and abused, as Abreu well describes. Together, these two articles by Schwartz and Abreu provided me with an understanding of historical facts surrounding the issue of motherhood and slavery.

            The second two articles that I have chosen for this research post deal more specifically with motherhood in American slave literature—particularly in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Holly Blackford discusses it in “Figures of Orality: The Master, The Mistress, The Slave Mother in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself”[3] (2002) and Stephanie Li does so in “Motherhood as Resistance in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”[4] (2006). Both women treat Jacobs’s work rather surprisingly, I thought, because they discuss it as a work of fiction. Blackford examines the symbols and extended metaphors and other figures of speech that she sees Jacobs employing in order to convey the fullness of slavery. Blackford claims that Jacobs is focusing on oral imagery (eating, drinking, vomiting) and images of animals hunting and consuming one another—implying far too much authorial intent for my comfort. Li does the same, even going so far as to assume that (what we were told was) Harriet Jacobs’s penname, Linda Brent, is actually a character/narrator Jacobs created to tell a fictional yet realistic account of slavery. Li bases her entire paper on this assumption and the “tropes of motherhood” she sees Jacobs playing up to relate the loss and degradation of slavery to her readers. I was dumb-struck and a little defensive while reading these two articles. I thought it very strange to discuss Harriet Jacobs’s work as fiction, as meant more for aesthetic appreciation than being a historical, biographical text. I know that Blackford and Li cannot be wrong in their treatment of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, but I was left feeling that their analyses had missed the point.

            As it turns out, the two historical articles I chose meant more to me than the literary theory articles did. I was more helped by Schwartz’s discussion of the family life of slaves and Abreu’s explanation of the Free Womb law than I was by Blackford’s and Li’s articles that were actually on my chosen topic of motherhood in American slave literature. I decided that I would use these four articles for my research post, however, because they represent the general outcome of my research thus far. It seems that a lot of scientific, historical research has been done concerning slavery and the family/motherhood angle, but not many people have written about American slave literature as such. This could be an area worth consideration for my Master’s Thesis.