Slave Female Community & Culture in the American South

Origins of Black Women in the American South

First black females arrived in Virginia in 1619.
They were part of a group of enslaved Africans, likely Kimbundu-speakers from the Kingdom of Ndongo (present-day Angola).
These Africans were captured by Portuguese forces and were being transported to Vera Cruz when they were pirated by a Dutch man-of-war and the British ship Treasurer.
The Dutch ship carried twenty of the original Angolans, including a woman named Isabel.
The Treasurer landed one female named Angela.
A ship arrived in Jamestown in 1622 with an African woman called Mary.
Records from this period are scarce, lacking details about origins, numbers, and cultural backgrounds.

Early Lives in the Chesapeake

Isabel and Angela were likely Ambundu women taken during Portuguese raids between 1618 and 1620.
They likely came from matrilineal societies in the "royal district" of Ndongo, located on a high plateau between the Lukala and Lutete Rivers.
Fifteen of those arriving in 1619 worked as indentured servants for Governor George Yeardley at Flowerdew Hundred.
The rural nature of colonial Virginia contrasted with the Ambundu's urban background.
The Ambundu people lived in cities with populations of around 20,000 to 30,000 residents.
Coming from Ndongo's royal district, they held various occupations, including farming, skilled trades, royalty, and royal service.
They were familiar with agriculture, growing grains like millet and sorghum and also raising livestock.
Women were responsible for domestic labor, farming, and market participation.
In Virginia, they cultivated tobacco, producing a crop valued at £ $10,000$ sterling in 1624.
Many Ambundu had been introduced to Catholicism before arriving in Virginia.

Community and Identity

The Ambundu shared a language, political affiliation, and a sense of identity as "people of the court."
This shared background formed the basis for community in the British colony.
Isabel married Anthoney, another member of the 1619 group, and they had a son baptized at Jamestown.
Their grandson, John Jr., named his farm at Somerset, Maryland, "Angola."

Fannie Berry and Later Generations

Fannie Berry, born around 1838, was enslaved in Appomattox County, Virginia.
Her owner, George Abbitt, was a railroad conductor and farmer who owned eleven enslaved people, including seven women.
The Abbitt family, including George Abbitt, Senior, owned significant land and enslaved people.
Fannie grew up in a rural antebellum environment where tobacco, corn, potatoes, cotton, hogs, sheep, and cattle were the main agricultural products.
Land and enslaved workers were vital resources.

The World of African American Women

Fannie grew up in a world occupied by African American women who comprised the majority of the workforce on her owner's and his relatives' farms.
Females were particularly important because male laborers were often hired out to work on the railroad.
The physical, psychological, social, moral, and cultural presence of black women shaped Fannie Berry's worldview.
Fannie became a chronicler of their lives and their layered community.
She passed on a Utopian view of her enslaved female community to later generations through storytelling.
Fannie's recollections focused on the women she lived, laughed, worked, cried for, admired, and learned from.

Fannie Berry's Recollections

Fannie's stories teach about community relations and values, although not all women shared the same views.
Her community of women is portrayed as a southern, rural "Amazonia" where black women fought for control of their person and personae against a racist, hierarchical, patriarchal society.
Losses due to sales through the domestic slave trade and divisions to heirs marred the community over time, but Fannie clung to memories of departed friends and associates.
Her idealized description reveals much about the cultural ethos of the community, even if not all slaves fully lived up to that ethos.
Fannie viewed her female community as a collection of individuals brought together by slavery.
These women often acted individually, but their actions had community-wide repercussions.

Examples of Resistance and Community Support

Mamy Lou: hid a local man named John from patrollers under her quilt.
An't Nellie: starved herself to death to avoid repeated abuse by her owner.
Sukie: prevented Master Abbitt from sexually abusing other enslaved women.
Even Sarah Ann Abbitt, the mistress, was part of the larger society occupied by black women.
Enslaved women experienced overlapping communities and cultures in the colonial and antebellum South.

Overlapping Communities and Cultures

Fannie Berry and her community experienced a social, cultural, and ideological phenomenon common to descendants of Africans enslaved in the Atlantic system.
The development of communities among the enslaved was crucial for their functioning both within and outside of the community.
Cultural identities and practices were central to their community life.

The Concept of Community

The idea of "communities" of enslaved Africans and African Americans became popular in the revisionist scholarship of the 1970s.
An early notation of community is found in the 1940 publication The Negro in Virginia.
This publication mentioned Anthony Johnson assembling a community of Africans in 17th-century Northampton County, Virginia.
The 1972 publication of John Blassingame's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South began the most significant discussion of this phenomenon.
Blassingame's notion of a slave community was revolutionary, as previous scholarship had not recognized slaves as having communities of their own.
Expressions of community were diverse, and Blassingame did not offer a systematic definition of "community."
Blassingame explored community through monogamous marriages, nuclear and extended families, church meetings, and social rituals.
He concluded that communal life derived from Africans and African Americans who shared a cultural past, a brutal reality, and an ethos of resistance.

Resistance and Community

The existence of a community for any enslaved person was a tangible form of resistance.
Communities had the potential to engender, institutionalize, recognize, and celebrate African humanity, artistic and intellectual talents, morality, and social existence.
These communities defied the blighted black identity imposed by white elites, which classified them as property, inferior beings, and pathological.

Sociological Perspective on Community

Sociologist Robert Birt, influenced by Franz Fanon, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Luther King, Jr., and John Blassingame, articulated the essence of community in black life.
Birt stated that community involves human association, bonds, and a sense of belonging and mutual understanding.
He concluded that "the creation of a community is a revolutionary praxis, its realization is an essential aim of a liberatory quest for freedom."

Intertwined Ideals

Ideals of community and freedom were intertwined in black thought across time and the southern landscape.
Blassingame noted that "the strivings for freedom among slaves commonly assumed a communal form."
Ideals of self-realization, social recognition, and group and individual worth were also intertwined in notions of community.
Slaveholders often noted the sense of community in the quarters, observing that slaves shared their goods, rarely stole from each other, and the strong helped the weak.

Enslaved People's Perspective

Jane Pyatt, a formerly enslaved woman, explained that the respect slaves had for each other revealed their true character.
Most of the time, this respect was not forced, and they were truthful, loving, and respectful to one another.
The sociopolitical and sociocultural context out of which the community of the enslaved emerged was unique in the colonial and antebellum South.
Blassingame's investigation of African cultural history, expression, and change helped to establish an historiographic mainstream.

Community Studies and Social History

The early 1970s saw the beginning of the heyday of "community studies" in U.S. social history.
The Slave Community was a groundbreaking work of scholarship on slavery and also in the examination of U.S. social history.
It was perhaps the first true social history of enslaved black southerners.
Blassingame's contemporaries were also not clearly defining the term "community."
Historian Richard Beeman commented that historians of early America were failing to define “community.”

Defining of Community

Darrett and Anita Rutman grappled with the question: "What is it that we study when we study 'community?'"
They conceived the subject to be simply the people of any particular locale, the pattern of their associations, and the changes in those patterns over time.
They noted that community is real but so diverse that it defies definition in terms of specific behavioral characteristics or values.
Sociologist Eric Wolf noted that "a peasantry is always in a dynamic state."
Evidence of community among the enslaved is varied, making it difficult to perceive them as part of one phenomenon.
Jessie Bernard notes that it is not always easy to see what diverse entities known as communities have in common.
It has also been difficult for scholars to distinguish between a particular slave community with distinct boundaries and the slave community, a "boundless" entity incorporating every Atlantic-world black slave.

Romanticization of Slave Community

This confusion has contributed to the romanticization of "the" slave community.
Communal ideals have sometimes obscured communal realities, leading scholars to assert an overly positive analysis of day-to-day slave relations.
There is evidence to support the assumption that there was a core group of ideals that enslaved men and women exhibited across time and space.
These ideals—family, freedom, resistance, group protection, and self-determination—served as the baseline for moral judgments about those inside and outside of "their" communities.

Historian Michael Gomez's Definition

Michael Gomez offers a comprehensive definition of community in his study of the evolution of culture, community, and identity among Africans and their descendants.
He defines community as: "a collection of individuals and families who share a common and identifiable network of sociocultural communications (for example, kinship, dietary patterns, labor conventions, artistic expressions, language) that have their origin in either a particular geographic area and period of time or a unique system of beliefs and rationalization."
The term does not necessarily imply conscious affinities, as members may not have viewed themselves as part of an African community in America.
African American identity was not a smooth transition but developed through related, contradictory processes.

Gender and the Historiography of Slave Community

Gomez included discussion of both men and women in his examination of slave culture and community, an important advancement since 1972.
Blassingame largely ignored the experiences of enslaved women, assuming that they mirrored those of enslaved men.
Blassingame described the quarters as a place where the slave could be a man, express his true feelings, and gain respect.
Deborah White's Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985) provided a serious consideration of enslaved women as an integral part of slave communities.
White's book helped scholars understand that enslaved women were active members of the slave community and had their own (women exclusive) communal groups.

Questions for Future Research

Since then, slavery scholars have generally acknowledged the idea of a "slave community" and "female slave networks."
Many questions about the southern slave community remain to be addressed:
- What forces lent themselves to the creation of communities in which women were active members?
- Did enslaved women's distinct community units complement or threaten the larger black community?
- What role did African culture play in female community dynamics?

Enslaved African Americans and Culture

Enslaved African Americans and white owners largely determined the cultural and communal environments of the quarters.
A main debate around early African American culture is over African retentions.
Sidney Mintz and Richard Price argued that communities cannot transfer their way of life and its accompanying beliefs and values intact from one place to another.
Allen Kulikoff outlined three stages of cultural change and development for Africans:
- Assimilation due to small numbers spread over large distances.
- Cultural conflict during the concentrated importation of large numbers of Africans.
- Cultural creation—the development of a new black Creole culture that was widely inclusive.

Perspectives from the Academic Community

A host of Chesapeake scholars of Kulikoff’s generation, including Lorena Walsh, Darrett and Anita Rutman, as well as Philip Morgan and Ira Berlin, whose expertise includes areas beyond the Chesapeake, have largely adhered to this pattern.
Mechal Sobel, Peter Wood, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Daniel Littlefield, Charles Joyner, Margaret Washington, Michael Gomez, Douglas Chambers, Albert Raboteau, John Thornton, Joseph Holloway, Sterling Stuckey, Judith Carney and other historians, to say nothing of at least three generations of social anthropologists, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, archeologists, material culture scholars, and African historians and art historians contributed to this discussion.

Synthesized Conclusion

An African-American represents an amalgam of the ethnic matrix; African American identity is a composite of identities.
From then on, the African antecedent would inform every aspect of it.
With the exception of historians Washington, Gomez, and Hall, the enslaved female experience, regarding African cultural retention and change, has not played a main role in the historiographical debate.

The Myth of the Negro Past

The issue of cultural retention has been debated for decades; the most famous episode was initiated by Melville J. Herskovits's classic monograph The Myth of the Negro Past (1941).
Prior, most American social scientists, black and white, did not believe that enslaved African peoples in the U.S. had retained any significant attributes of their ethnic cultures.
Throughout the New World, the notion that the enslaved workers had cultures caused philosophical and sociological debate, psychological manipulation, and legal repression by various classes of slaveholders.
Slaveholders understood that enslaved laborers had cultural attributes and attitudes that were distinct and African-derived.

Slaveholder Perceptions of African Culture

They viewed some traits as oppositional to their New World social, cultural, and economic priorities and others worthwhile, even necessary.
Slaveholder recognition of these African-derived cultures informed their