By Ashley Danielle

“Did slaves have orgasms?” It’s not the type of thought-provoking question I expected to find on the submission page of a publication popularly hailed as progressive, but at the same time I wasn’t shocked.

But the subsequent rationalization for asking the question—“Hey it’s a question worth asking”—reiterated what was already evident in the usage of the word “slave” as opposed to enslaved peoples. Whoever posed this question had never thought of the lives my ancestors lived beyond the brutality they were subjected to, and assumed their readers hadn’t either.

What’s worse is that the assumption that their audience had not considered the sexual agency of my enslaved ancestors is probably right. In the year of egregiously contrarian “arguments” centered on “was slavery a choice,” it’s become even more apparent that most people only have a rudimentary understanding of the system which built this country. Thus, it’s no surprise to me when people show they’re unable to stretch their minds to conceive of the full lives that the enslaved lived.

Most of this misunderstanding is rooted in the erroneous narrative of slavery published by white abolitionists who sought sympathy from their white readers. Formerly enslaved Black people could not tell their own stories without a stamp of approval from a white sponsor. As a result, there are known instances of narratives being edited or translated in ways that best suited the needs of the white publisher.

This is a crucial difference. They focused on the horrific treatment slave-owners subjected their property to because this (and not the inherent wrongness of enslaving humans) was the primary argument against the institution.

Because white abolitionists solely relied on the harrowing brutality of plantation-based enslavement, and minimized (if not flat out ignored) the immorality of the institution in whole, the sexualities and consensual sexual behaviors amongst the enslaved were rarely addressed. When they were, it was in the context of rape and other forms of sexual violence enslaved people were forced to endure at the behest of slave masters and their agents.

This has continued to serve as the framework for how the masses think about slavery today. Slavery is discussed in incomplete, inaccurate, fragments that depict Black suffering and evoke white guilt from a safe distance, preventing the analysis of how it continues to influence our society today.

I witnessed this first hand when I made the mistake of visiting the Middleton plantation in South Carolina. It was only after signing up for a tour advertised as being told from the perspective of the enslaved that I found out the Middleton Foundation ran the plantation. Our white tour guide was sure to paint his boss’ family in a redemptive light, and I knew he’d done his job well when I watched a white woman’s face contort in disgust after he told us that some of the enslaved had burned the big house down after finding out they’d been emancipated.   

Because of the framing of these narratives, even some Black people regard conversations about slavery as counterproductive, boycotting shows and movies dealing with the subject in order to express their desire for storylines that more “accurately” depict the multifaceted lives of Black people. However, neglecting to tell and listen to the countless full stories of those who were enslaved is a continuation of the false narrative, and collusion in the oppression it enables.  

It is why I have made the commitment to a radical re-telling. Storytelling that is truthful and complete, which honors the full lives—sex lives included—of my ancestors.

I look to examples like Underground, the now cancelled WGN show, which focused on a group of enslaved people’s harrowing journey to freedom, to see how masterfully this task can be done. I don’t know if Harriet Jacobs served as an inspiration behind one of my favorite characters, Ernestine, but I thought of her as I watched the scenes of Ernestine attempting to grab hold of some power through the wielding the only weapon she had—her sexuality.

When I went to Edenton, North Carolina to visit the home of Harriet, the writer of the popular narrative Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl, I thought about the similarities between the two women. Like Ernestine, Harriet tried to exploit the sexual tyranny under which enslaved Black women lived out of necessity. Her need for a plan began when she was only 15 years old after her master, Norcom, began making unwanted sexual advances.

In an effort to distance Harriet from the mistress of the house, who was suspicious of her husband’s nefarious intentions, he built Harriet a cottage right outside of town. During that time, Harriet “consented” to a “love affair” with a white lawyer named Sands because she  preferred this ordeal over repeatedly being raped by her master. She also believed it was a gateway to freedom.

In her words, the decision was made with “deliberate calculation.” She hoped that by becoming pregnant with Sands children, Norcom would sell her to her “lover” out of disgust and he would then sign her freedom papers. Unfortunately, her plan backfired, and when she learned that instead of selling her to Sands, Norcom intended to send her and her children to his plantation as field hands she was forced to devise what became her famous attic plan.

In Harriet’s narrative, she’s forced to assume a remorseful tone for her “immorality” in order to maintain the “sympathy” of white women by warding off the stereotype of the seductress, who tricked white men into sexual relations they couldn’t resist since their wives were so “pure.” But there is no need for such approval in Ernestine’s case. She utilizes her sexuality in a way that could almost convince you she was in complete control of the relationship and the man who owned her.

All too often, stories like these are misrepresented; with women typically being portrayed as mere victims, or as having more agency than ever possible in master-slave relationships. However, Harriet Jacobs was able to depict the complicated realities many enslaved Black women faced.

So many other narratives have been watered down or edited that deserve a rightful re-telling. For instance, in an essay found in the collection Sex, Power, Slavery, there is an excerpt from the narrative of a formerly enslaved Cuban man named Juan Francisco Manzano. He recounts the sexual interactions he witnessed amongst the enslaved:

… there was always a little stream near every plantation. It sometimes happened that a woman lingered behind and met a man just as he was about to go into the water. Then they would go off together and get down to business. If not they would go to the reservoirs, which were the pools they dug to store water.

He goes on to discuss the shortage of women on the particular plantation he was held hostage upon, and explained that while some men suffered, “others had sex between themselves, and did not want to know anything of women.” Juan Francisco makes clear his opinion “that a man can stick his arse where he wants.”

I give these examples to show how asinine it is to pose a question such as, “did slaves have orgasms?” Of course they did. They were real people. With real lives and real relationships, who had real pleasurable sex. And it only takes thinking of them as such to figure that out.

The more important questions come after that. Those are the ones we have to ask in order to begin scratching the surface of the rich cache of stories, which must be told to understand how the mechanisms of slavery affects our lives today. We must unlock this cache by taking control of the narrative from publishers and plantation owners alike. This is the beginning of my part.

Suggested Reading
The “Sexuality & Slavery: Exposing the History of Enslaved People in the Americas“  conference held at the University of Texas at Austin from November 11 – 12th, 2011 features an array of papers on this topic.

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