Jessica Marie Johnson - Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Wicked Flesh

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Series editors:

Daniel K. Richter, Kathleen M. Brown,

Max Cavitch, and David Waldstreicher

Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial,

revolutionary, and early national history and culture,

Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and

events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and

with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600

to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the

McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series

is available from the publisher.

Wicked Flesh

Black Women,
Intimacy, and Freedom
in the Atlantic World

Jessica Marie Johnson

Copyright 2020 Jessica Marie Johnson

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 978-0-8122-5238-5

To Aliette Cuqui Nuez Medina

To Mae Frances Johnson

To Clyde A. Woods, James E. McLeod, and Stephanie M. H. Camp

To Ira Berlin

To New Orleans, before the Storm

Contents

Map 1. New Orleans Atlantic world, circa 16851810.

Map 2. The Gulf Coast and the Caribbean in the eighteenth century.

Map 3. Senegambia. Adapted from Guillaume Delisle, Carte de la Barbarie, de la Nigritie, et de la Guine, 1718. Original map available at the Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress, https://lccn.loc.gov/2005625339 (accessed January 21, 2020).

Introduction

The Women in the Water

Be the woman in the water.

Rae Paris, The Forgetting Tree, 2004

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World examines how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and enact freedom in the Atlantic world.

Free status did not define freedom. Like the rise of chattel slavery itself, the nature of free status under slavery relied on constructions of gender and sexuality rooted in the circum-Atlantic exchange of black bodies and plantation commodities. Intimate acts mated with edicts, codes, and imperial jurisprudence to produce bodies of law like the 1685 Code Noir, the first comprehensive slave code written for the Americas.

Freedom gained definition when and as African women and women of African descent pushed back against their own enslavement and subject position. These women, when encountering Atlantic slavery, whether along the African coast or in the Americas, did not limit their understanding of freedom to legal or official status, no matter how triumphant the manumission battle that was won. They could not. First, slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials

Understanding the role intimacy and kinship played in black womens lives highlights black womens everyday understanding of freedom as centered around safety and security for themselves and their progeny. Safety, particularly safety from intimate violence, and security lay at the heart of decisions to secure or reject patrons, partners, lovers, and other kin. Black womens intimacy with individuals ranged along the spectrum of coerced to strategic, from fraternal to sexual. Determined to build community and make generations, imagining futures that were, if not beyond bondage, at least buttressed against harm, they cultivated, protected, and defended kinship networks. They engaged in a range of practices meant to safeguard their bodies and their legacies. At times this included legitimating kinship ties through formal sacred institutions like the Catholic Church. Practicing freedom did not necessarily mean seeking a freedom removed from other social relations in society. At other times, women participated in or created new institutions and less formal criteria for choosing kin. Slaveholding societies were violent, brutal places. Black women were not immune from this, and some of their actions enfolded with existing relations of exploitation and domination. Creating and protecting kinship networks sometimes meant denying access to their chosen community, even despite biological ties. Safety and security for some women included exploiting enslaved labor, particularly the labor of enslaved women, with all of its attendant violence. The freedom that black women practiced was murky, messy, and contingent. It also adapted as times and circumstances changed. Wicked Flesh embraces the contradictions as exemplifying how high the stakes were and how precarious the search for safe space could be in a world of slaves.

This book is about the nature of those intimate and kinship ties, their ebb and flow, their power and their violence, and the role African women played in making freedom free for all people of African descent.

Guided by Rae Pariss call to be the woman in the water, Wicked Flesh positions black women as swimming at the crossroads between empires and oceans, diasporas and archipelagos. By engaging them in the overlapping diasporas they traversed, this study argues, a fuller history of freedom, black humanity, and resistance to empire begins to be revealed.to circumvent an archive of disappearing bodies, limited detail, and excessive violence.

To center New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black womens practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh necessarily drew from archival documents written in multiple languages, scattered in institutions across Louisiana and the world. Although it is critical to respect the limits of each document, by bringing material together in careful and creative ways, snippets of black womens lives begin to unfold.

Wicked Flesh from Senegal to New Orleans

In Senegambia, where this story begins, succession conflicts, intermittent civil war, and resistance to state power occupied the Wolof rulers of Kajoor, Waalo, and Bawol, as well as rulers and societies in nearby Futa Tooro and Galam. Bracketed by the Senegal and Gambia rivers, an array of polities lived, labored, and jockeyed for power. The Wolof states that emerged from the disintegration of the Jollof empire was deeply influenced by Muslim polities to the north and Mande to the east. In 1695, Latsukaabe Faal united the Wolof kingdoms of Kajoor and Bawol under himself, a dynasty that ruled into the nineteenth century.Imperial expansion within and among the Wolof, which included absorbing and attempting to absorb and enslave other groups like the Sereer and Pulaar, did not begin with European contact. Wolof royals and aristocrats took advantage of trade with Europeans to gain power and prestige as part of centuries-older struggles between kingdoms and dynasties. Europeans did not introduce slavery or imperial conflict into West Africabut when and as it benefited them, they did exacerbate it.