Sable Venus She Devil

Women's History Review
ISSN: 0961-2025 (Print) 1747-583X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwhr20
‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British

slavery and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's
identities, c. 1650–1838
Barbara Bush
To cite this article: Barbara Bush (2000) ‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British slavery
and the ‘fabulous fiction’ of black women's identities, c. 1650–1838, Women's History Review, 9:4,
761-789
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020000200262
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Women’s History Review, Volume 9, Number 4, 2000
‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ or

‘Drudge’? British Slavery and the
‘Fabulous Fiction’ of Black Women’s
Identities, c. 1650–1838
BARBARA BUSH
Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom
ABSRACT In this article, the author addresses the problem of how much
historians can understand about the identities of individuals living in a
different epoch in time, in relation to what has been termed the ‘fabulous
fiction’ of black women’s identities in slavery and freedom. A central argument
is that stereotypes of black women were highly gendered and clustered
around contradictory representations, particularly the ‘Sable Venus’, ‘She
Devil’ and passive ‘drudge’. Thus, the persistence of an African-centred
‘woman’s culture’ and strategies of resistance, collaboration and survival are
vital to understanding black women’s self-defined (as opposed to white
attributed) identities. The first section examines the relationship between
gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women’s
identities. This is followed by a critical deconstruction of the ‘Sable Venus’
and interrelated black and white gendered identities in colonial slave society.
The final section analyses the importance of the ‘She Devil’ in representing
the resistant slave woman who defied the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white
stereotyping of black women. A wide time span is adopted in order to analyse
how black women’s relationship to the gendered power structures
underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time, as did ‘white visions’ of their
identities. Unifying themes are the central location black women had in the
development of colonial relations between black and white and the
implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European
cultures for black women’s gendered identities.
Introduction
Of all groups of women, including other colonised groups, black diaspora
women have been subjected to the most continuous and damaging
misrepresentation in mainstream history and come under the most pressure
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to embrace new identities.[1] This article focuses on ‘white visions’ of black
lives and addresses the problem of what Maya Angelou has termed the
‘fabulous fiction’ of black women’s identities.[2] From the earliest
encounters between Europeans and Africans, black women were placed
‘beyond the pale’ of Western progress and morality and this has had
enduring repercussions for black diaspora women.[3] White men created a
black woman who essentially reflected their needs, economic or sexual.
Fired by the sexual promise of the ‘Sable Venus’, they simultaneously
demonised the resistant ‘She Devils’. Behind these more vivid white
constructs was the mass of faceless, asexual women visualised as mere
‘drudges’.
These conflicting representations suggest inconsistencies in the
internal ‘logic’ of racist stereotypes of black women, and contemporary
stereotypes arguably reflected distorted elements of reality. The ‘Sable
Venus’ represented male erotic fantasies, but also the widespread practice of
concubinage and sexual exploitation of black women. The ‘drudge’ locates
women as the backbone of the slave labour force, who had to bear the dual
burden of work and childbearing. The ‘She Devil’ suggests the degree of
resistance of black women against ‘slave labour’ and also illustrates the ways
in which changes and developments in stereotypes reflect the anxieties of
powerful groups.[4] Stereotypes of black women were thus highly gendered
and clustered around contradictory representations and it is only in
deconstruction of this ‘fabulous fiction’ of white imaginings that we can
glimpse the ‘personhood’ of the black woman and gain a sense of
oppositional identities.
Because of the rich detail they contain about slave women, I have
made extensive use of the Jamaica diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, a
plantation overseer who later became a small-time slave-owner, to
demonstrate how contradictions embedded in contemporary white
representations enable us to develop a more positive reconstruction of
individual slave women’s lives. As Douglas Hall observes, there is no other
document which by daily record over thirty-six years, ‘allows us to find
people rather than names’ among the slave workforce.[5] However, such
contemporary records raise important issues relating to writing ‘the history
of the person’ and the conceptualisation of identities in a past epoch.
Identity is a slippery concept and, as Nikolas Rose points out, there are
dangers of reading the past into the present. Current concepts of the self
and identity, drawing on psychological theories, often ‘presuppose a way of
thinking that itself is an outcome of [nineteenth- and twentieth-century]
history’.[6] But such concepts can also deepen our understanding of the new
diasporic identities of Caribbean slaves. Drawing on Foucault, Rose further
points out that ‘our relation to ourselves’ is rooted in ‘mundane, ordinary
practices of every-day life and the presuppositions that shape the conduct of
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STEREOTYPES OF BLACK WOMEN 1650–1838
human beings in particular sites and practices’. The individual, he argues,

does not have a continuous history but a ‘diversity of languages of
personhood’ which embrace ‘character, identity, reputation, honour, mother,
daughter’. Thistlewood’s diaries, which were written as a record of the
‘mundane ... practices’ of parochial eighteenth-century colonial society,
clearly reflect these complexities in relation to individual women.[7]
As Emilia Viotta da Costa observes, we can never know what slaves
thought and how they interpreted their world but the rich and detailed
records left by some whites can help us reconstruct their lives in the
absence of other sources.[8] Also embedded in such sources are vital clues
to contemporary discourses relating to slave women, which, observes Hilary
Beckles, were ‘internally organised by patriarchal mobilisations of gender
ideologies’. Thus, conceptualising women as ‘gendered political subjects’
allows us to redefine narrative history as a process by which ‘power and
knowledge are perpetually constituted’.[9] This conceptualisation helps us to
understand more fully the tensions between conflict and compromise in
black women’s responses to enslavement and how they defined their
‘personhood’, despite racial and gender oppression. The cultural struggles
which developed over the negotiation of black identity are central to
understanding a divided or ‘double consciousness’ of slaves in
simultaneously adapting to and resisting enslavement. For black women the
term ‘triple consciousness’ may be more appropriate as they not only had to
negotiate conflicts between a racist white, and a formative Afrocentric Creole
culture, but also gender identity in relation to white men, black men and
white women.
Contemporary records reveal that black women’s relationship to the
gendered power structures underpinning colonial slavery shifted over time,
as did ‘white visions’ of their identities. This article will thus chart the
odyssey of the black woman from Africa to the Caribbean, from the point of
enslavement to freedom. It will analyse the origins of racial stereotypes and
the implications of contact at the harsh interface of African and European
cultures for slave women’s gendered identities. The first section, ‘Race,
Gender and Identity: from Africa to the Caribbean’, examines how and why
contemporary white stereotypes emerged and the relationship between
gender, race and culture in the mediation of African and slave women’s
identities. This is followed by ‘Deconstructing the “Sable Venus”: sexuality,
gender relations and strategies for survival’, an analysis of concubinage and
the interrelated identities of black and white women within the context of
white patriarchal power and the distorted mores of colonial slave society. In
addition to examining concubinage as a strategy of survival, it also
highlights the importance of African-derived culture and female networks in
black women’s self-definition of their ‘personhood’ in enslavement. The final
section, ‘“She Devils”: the self-realisation of black women in slavery and
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Barbara Bush
freedom’, discusses the stereotype of the ‘She Devil’, as both a reflection of
contemporary racist discourse and strong evidence for the existence of a
resistant black woman who negated white constructs of the compliant
asexual worker-‘drudge’ and the eroticised ‘Sable Venus’. This includes a
brief analysis of the impact of Emancipation on black women’s identities.
The main argument which threads through these three sections is that slave
women forged their own oppositional identities and asserted their
‘personhood’ through a complex interplay between ‘collaboration’, survival
strategies, an African-derived women’s culture and active resistance. In so
doing, they came to occupy a central location in the development of colonial
society.
Race, Gender and Identity: from Africa to the Caribbean

The cultural interface between European and African across the ‘Black
Atlantic’ embraced complex and changing patterns of gender, race and class
oppression. From the earliest point of contact in the late fifteenth century,
Europeans placed African women at the base of the ‘pyramid of civilisation’.
They did not fit the Graeco-Roman ideal of beauty, which was bound up with
fairness, delicacy and physical frailty. Contemporary pro-slavery accounts
stressed black women’s muscular build and subhuman traits, frequently
comparing them to animals. They reputedly bore children as easily as female
orang-utans, in contrast to white women, who had to be wary of using slave
women as wet-nurses as their milk was racially tainted and corrupt.[10]
These unfavourable comparisons to white women also defined slave
women’s class position as occupying the lowest, and most degrading,
occupations in black and white men’s eyes, ‘women’s work’ of domestic
chores, low-status agricultural and plantation labour or prostitution.
In understanding these processes of stereotyping, the age of slave
women is important. Whilst representations of young, sexualised women or
active workers dominate racist discourses, older women are rendered much
less visible and, if they appear in contemporary accounts, it is as midwives
(‘grandees’), doctoresses or sinister ‘haggs’ and dangerous ‘obeah’ women. It
was the older women who were thus most commonly associated with a
power and influence amongst slaves associated with ‘bad’ African practices.
There was a grain of truth in these white perceptions, for such women
arguably held important positions in slave communities as guardians of folk
knowledge.[11] Interestingly, there is no ‘good’ Caribbean stereotype
equivalent to the ‘loyal Mammy’ of the American South until the twentieth
century. By this time, African-Caribbeans had been ‘civilised’ by colonial rule
and transformed into loyal subjects (in contrast to the more ‘primitive’
Africans) and the emergence of the ‘Tourist Caribbean’ resulted in new
constructs of both black men and women. American race discourse had also
764
become more prevalent in popular culture through the dominance of the

new American film industry. Such differences between representations of
slave women in the USA and the Caribbean highlight the importance of
specific chronological and socio-political contexts in shaping racial
stereotypes.[12]
At the source of eighteenth-century white stereotypes were
assumptions about the nature of African culture and patriarchy. Captain
John Adams, in his memoirs of trading in West Africa in the late eighteenth
century, noted of Fanti women (from what is now present-day Ghana):
The women here ... as well as in other parts of Africa, sow and reap,
grind corn, carry wood and water, and perform all the drudgery
attendant on housekeeping: while their husbands are perhaps gossiping,
drinking and sleeping.[13]
Travellers’ tales from Africa commented on women’s strength and
muscularity and the way they competed with men in ‘enduring toil, hardship
and privations’. Women’s drudge status was confirmed by ‘polygamy’, which
whites believed simultaneously promoted promiscuity whilst it also reduced
women to ‘the domestic slaves of men’.[14]
African women were thus depicted from early contact with whites as
either submissive workhorses or ‘hot consitution’d’ scarlet women, lewd and
promiscuous in their relations with black and white men. The ‘heathen’
practice of ‘polygamy’ also devalued African marriage patterns in the eyes of
whites who equated it with immorality and African addiction to ‘sensual
enjoyments’. This justified white men’s sexual exploitation of slave women,
for if such women were not even valued by their own men, what moral value
could they possibly have as chattel goods? The low worth of slave women
was also compounded by the fact that they were generally more plentiful
than male slaves, who were usually in more demand. Women were easier to
capture and they could also be sold into slavery for infertility or ‘crimes’
against their communities such as adultery.[15]
Gender, race and ‘class’ inequality are thus equally fundamental to
understanding slave women’s identities. Why and how did such inequalities
originate? Gerda Lerner has argued that as the oppression of women pre-
dated slavery, it provided the structural model and made it possible. From
antiquity, when men were killed in war, women and children were spared
but enslaved.[16] Women have thus always been vulnerable to enslavement
because of their status in patriarchal societies and women slaves
predominated in the internal African slave trade. Moreover, it may be argued
that African women experienced slavery of a sort within the family, through
the practice of ‘bride price’, and were accustomed to being bartered and
having little control over their own destinies.[17] So, for some women, their
identity was already defined as domestic slaves pre-capture. As Meillassoux
points out, it is often overlooked that many African slaves brought from
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Africa were slaves before they left.[18] For those who were not enslaved,
identity came primarily through motherhood and in relationship to the
deeper structures of family and kin which cohered African societies. Maria
Cutrafelli has argued that in such societies, a collective as opposed to
individual identity prevailed and women were supported by a ‘remarkable
degree of female solidarity’. We must be wary, observes Coquery-Vidrovitch,
about generalising about ‘African women’, given the diversity of cultures
and significant differences between regions of Africa.[19] However, the
majority of slaves came from West Africa where, despite cultural and
linguistic diversity, certain core cultural values relating to kinship, religion
and gender roles facilitated the forging of a new Creole African-Caribbean
culture.[20] This culture fostered a degree of solidarity amongst slave
women, centred on kin, work gangs or shipmates. Such bonds are clearly
evident amongst the women of whom Thistlewood writes.
African women’s identities were also influenced by contact with white
men on the African trading coast. Concubinage began from the earliest
contact on the African coast. Factors could go months or even years without
seeing other Europeans and many had to adapt their lifestyles, taking
mulatto or African ‘wives’ (or a series of them) and setting up a pattern
which was which replicated in the Caribbean. One sea captain noted that for
white men it was:
a pleasant way of marrying, for they can turn [African women] on and
off and take others at pleasure; which makes them very careful to
humour their husbands, in washing their linen, cleaning their chambers
etc. and the charge of keeping them is little or nothing.[21]
On the African coast, however, with the exception of bartered slaves, the
power relationship between African and European was not as unequal as it
was in the Caribbean. White men frequently depended on coastal Africans
for personal survival and the success of their trade and some gained
protection and favours from well-connected women. Thus, Nicholas
Buckeridge, Senior Agent of the Cape Coast Castle (now in present-day
Ghana) in 1700, was protected from inland marauders by ‘the Queen of
Winnebah [a trading lodge east of Cape Coast]’ who was ‘about fifty year
old, black as jet, but very corpulent’ and ‘very free of her kisses to Mr
Buckeridge, whom she seemed to esteem’.[22] Mixed-race sons, through
their knowledge of English language and customs and influential
connections gained from their father, combined with their mothers’
traditional chiefly connections, profited from the slave trade and generated a
powerful coloured coastal elite which was to play an important role in trade
and politics in future years.[23] Given the powerful positions of some African
women, it is likely that they were as much implicated in the capture,
oppression and sale of fellow Africans as were the shrewd male traders.
766
But relations between African women and white men sharply

deteriorated with the expansion of the slave trade. On board ship, some
women could receive meagre favours for sexual services, but forced violation
and gross maltreatment, including flogging, became routine as white men
and their human cargo were increasingly brutalised. For the majority of
enslaved women, this pattern persisted in the colonial slave societies to
which they were transported. According to Thistlewood, slave women
continued to receive small favours for casual sex (between 2 and 4 bitts or
roughly equivalent to the fee charged for a day’s hire of a field slave).
However, it should be borne in mind that Thistlewood and other men he
refers to were prone to male boastings and claiming sex as a ‘right’, which
casts doubt on the extent to which slave women voluntarily sold their sexual
services.
Thus, enslavement and transportation to the Caribbean resulted in a
radical, white ‘remaking’ of black womanhood. African women were now
identified primarily as marketable bodies, the more attractive of which might
provide casual sexual comfort for a white sailor. In defining slaves as
commodities and denying them their humanity and family bonds, whites
sought to create identities for slave women and men which would
disempower them through cultural ‘stripping’ to ensure a controllable,
productive and atomised workforce. The process of dehumanisation was
reinforced by intimate ‘policing’ of slaves’ bodies, for it was only their
physical bodies which were of value to the slavers. African women who,
judged Richard Ligon, had an innate sense of ‘modesty and decorum’, were
subject to humiliating invasion of their bodies, including their ‘privities’, by
white doctors attached to slave ships.[24] The humiliation continued at slave
sales.
Objectification and commodification of the slave body was also
achieved through ‘natal alienation’, the denial of the slave’s history, kinship
bonds and right to a past or future.[25] Renaming and branding was an
essential part of this process. Sale and slave runaway advertisements often
identified African slaves simply by owners’ brands, or markings associated
with their ethnic origins, such as tattoos, ritual scars and filed teeth. These
identification marks are also commonly referred to by Thistlewood and
provide the only descriptions of slave women with whom he came into
contact. The naming process was arbitrary and random and the names of
some slaves must have changed several times simply through resale. When
Thistlewood bought a new slave, ‘a Congo girl, 9 or 10 years old’, he
promptly named her ‘Sally’, with no regard for her former name (Sally was
subsequently to prove one of his most troublesome slaves).[26]
The women Thistlewood mentions in his diaries had a mixture of
English names (Rose, Mary, Nancy) but some also had names (Mimber,
Coobah, Phibbah) which were obviously of African origin. Women were also
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identified by their ethnic origin, such as ‘Nago Jenny’ or by the plantation
they belonged to, as in ‘Egypt Rose’. African names were associated with
‘heathenism’, which may explain why Phibbah’s daughter, Paradise Coobah,
became known as ‘Jenny Young’ after she was baptised into Christianity.[27]
Yet, African names persisted, even amongst Creoles, (slaves born in the
Caribbean) and were used by slave owners, possibly to reiterate the
‘heathenism’ by which whites justified slave status, as well as to emphasise
the ‘otherness’ of African slave women. In Jamaica, these were frequently
based on Asante day names, Quasheba, Cuba (Coobah) and Yabba (Abba),
from the Asante Akosuwa, Akuwa and Yaa or Yawa, which translate broadly
as Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday. (‘Ashantee’ slaves were associated with
the area of West Africa now in modern-day Ghana and were highly valued
for their intelligence, skills and the fine physical physiques of both men and
women.)
In rural African societies, naming had deep social significance, linked
to transmission of ancestral spirits. Felly Nkweto Simmonds has suggested
that denial of proper naming ceremonies in matriarchal cultures can disrupt
the female line, leading to ‘loss and confusion in identity’.[28] However,
there is evidence that in the Caribbean, names were passed down through
female generations and were not always imposed by masters. Women slaves
were much more likely than male slaves to be associated with their mothers
by name, as in ‘Phibbah’s Coobah’, ‘Abbas’ Mary’, ‘Nancy’s Phibbah’. Rarely
were black women’s names associated with men, unless they were ‘kept’ by
whites, as in ‘Mr Say’s Vine’, or they were mulattos, whose white parentage
was acknowledged in their ‘surname’. We can never know the ways in which
slaves identified each other, but the importance of names and identity is
reflected in the fact that slaves, male and female, often had several names or
aliases, which confused masters and public authorities. This is illustrated in
an advertisement for a Kingston-born woman named Flora who had run
away with her daughter, Phiba (sic), ‘who calls herself often Cuba and
Abba’. Cuba was also ‘marked on both shoulders A.W.’ but the brand was
‘raised in lumps from endeavouring to take them out’ a testimony to how
one woman rejected her slave identity.[29]
Faced with the loss and dissolution of their worlds, African women had
to negotiate many of the contradictions, dualities and ambiguities which
have been explored in relation to the ‘post-colonial’ migrant.[30] Black
women, writes Toni Morrison, had to deal with ‘post-modern problems’
before the nineteenth century and the strategies of survival which
individuals adopted reflected ‘the truly modern person’. Morrison’s view is
supported by the intellectual historian, David Brion Davis, who defined a
slave as ‘a replaceable and interchangeable outsider faced with the
unpredictable need of adjusting to a wholly alien culture ... the prototype for
the migratory labour and confused identity which accompanied every phase
768
of human progress’. The argument that Caribbean slavery created new,

‘modern’ people is reflected in recent trends in cultural and literary studies
which conceptualise Caribbean Creole culture as dynamic, new and unique,
forged through, and in conflict with, modernity.[31]
Thus, gendered roles and identities were transformed in the Caribbean
and strongly differentiated the experiences of male and female slaves. In the
Caribbean, as in Africa, slave women were highly valued for their labour, not
simply as childbearers. Overseers were predominantly male slaves and slave
men in general benefited from women’s domestic labour. A planter’s wife
commented on this:
A wife and family ... have been the greatest possible advantage to a
[male] slave ... his wife works and cooks, the children soon begin to
assist the mother and they all work in their gardens and grounds.[32]
Women also had to endure the ‘toils of childbirth’ and, if young and
attractive, were always vulnerable to rape, risking punishment if they
refused the unwanted advances of white men. As Gerder Lerner observes,
rape has always been used to ‘dishonour’ women, acting as a ‘symbolic
castration’ of their menfolk, who are unable to provide patriarchal
protection, thus rendering the whole fabric of the culture of the enslaved
society invalid.[33] Such experiences are recorded in grim detail in the
diaries of Thomas Thistlewood, who frequently exerted his ‘droit de
seigneur’.
But, paradoxically, women were able to ‘get on’ in slave societies
through using their sexuality as the ‘wives’ of white men. For men of a more
modest background, matrimony was a ‘bar to their expectations’ or
proscribed in their contracts as overseers. As Maria Nugent, a Governor’s
wife, who lived in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, noted, every ‘vulgar Scottish
Sultan’ had his ‘black chere amie’.[34] As the propaganda war between pro-
and anti-slavery factions intensified, crude caricatures of black women
filtered more widely into British popular culture. A cartoon of 1808, for
instance, depicts ‘Johnny Newcome in Love in the West Indies’. He is
smitten with the charms of ‘Mimbo Wampa’ on ‘Frying Pan Island’, who he
takes to ‘wife’, and has several ‘little Newcomes’. ‘Mimbo’ is a gross
caricature portrayed with a pipe, hat, large red hoop earrings, fat drooping
breasts, splayed bare feet and a wide grin. She is described as ‘a “Sable
Venus” daughter of Wampo Wampo of the Silver Sand Hills in Congo’ and
alleged to hold inordinate power over Johnny.[35] The scarcity of white
women undoubtedly contributed to the practice of concubinage, which was
heavily censured in England. However, the fact that men with wives also
indulged in the ‘forbidden fruit’ of the ‘Sable Venus’ is testimony to the
power of white men but also the extent to which concubinage had become
an essential survival strategy for some younger slave women. Hence, a fuller
understanding of the complexities of concubinage and its role in Caribbean
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Barbara Bush
society demands a critical deconstruction of the stereotype of the ‘Sable
Venus’.
Deconstructing the ‘Sable Venus’:

sexuality, gender relations and strategies for survival
The ‘Sable Venus’ was one of the most powerful eighteenth-century
constructs of African womanhood, which reflected white male obsessions
with sexual otherness and exoticism. ‘The “Sable Venus”: an ode’ (1765) by
Isaac Teale is described by Robert Young as ‘[an] extraordinary ...
articulation of the sexual economy of desire in the fantasies of race’:
O Sable Queen! Thy mild Domain
I seek and court thy gentle reign
So soothing, soft and sweet.
Where meeting love, sincere delight
Fond pleasures, ready joys invite,
And unbrought raptures meet.
Do thou in gentle Phibia smile,

In artful Benneba beguile,
In wanton Mimba pout
In sprightly Cuba’s eyes look gay
Or grave in sober Quasheba
I still shall find thee out.[36]
Tempting, scheming, wanton; all is here except the concrete reality of
labour.
Some white men were clearly besotted by the charms of some slave
women: this is evident in, for instance, John Stedman’s praise of his mulatto
mistress, Joanna, and Matthew Lewis’s description of the beautiful mulatto,
Mary Wiggins, as ‘the most picturesque object’ he had seen for twenty
years.[37] Attractive women knew how to use their charms. Here Foucault’s
arguments about sexuality as a vital transfer point for relations of power is
useful.[38] It explains the limited and always conditional influence some
younger women may have had over white men. As a survival strategy,
concubinage offered not only material favours but also better treatment and
manumission for slave women and their mulatto children. Thistlewood’s
Phibbah was particularly successful here (‘To Phibbah six pairs of shoes and
much cloth off the boat’) and, as his long time ‘wife’, she prospered.
Thistlewood’s diaries have commonly been used as evidence of the
acute violation of slave women but, as Hilary Beckles points out, they also
demonstrate that Phibbah and other enslaved women were at the centre of
Thistlewood’s personal and public world. Phibbah’s owner, Mr Cope,
charged Thistlewood heavily for Phibbah’s rent and for the manumission of
770
the child she bore to Thistlewood. Robin Blackburn suggests that

Thistlewood’s emotional attachment to Phibbah increased the power Cope,
as his white employer, exerted over him.[39] Whilst there was mutual
exploitation in the relationship between Thistlewood and Phibbah, it may be
argued that genuine affection also existed, with Phibbah frequently sending
Thistlewood presents of produce from her successful provision grounds.
Thistlewood eventually became a small property owner himself and, in his
will, he made provisions for Phibbah’s freedom.
Since the origins of slavery, suggests Gerder Lerner, the function of
servant and concubine has been combined, offering the prospect of upward
mobility.[40] In the Caribbean, liaisons with white men also facilitated slave
women’s independent ‘business’ activities. Thistlewood records how ‘House
Franke’ dealt in horses, selling them to whites. When her husband, Quashe,
died, she entertained a ‘vast’ company at the ‘Negro houses’, killing ‘a
heifer, several hogs etc.’ ‘His’ Phibbah earned money by ‘sewing, baking
cassava [and selling] musk melons and water melons out of her ground’.
Nancy, Phibbah’s sister, was able to hire a slave from her owner, Mr Cope,
for 5 pounds per annum to help look after her son. Phibbah’s daughter,
Coobah, who also had a relationship with a white man, was an equally
shrewd businesswoman, profiting from her two trips to England with her
owners. Not only did she bring Thistlewood a present of china but also sold
him ‘24 yards of coarse sheeting’. Thistlewood was frequently dependent on
entrepreneurial black women for his own economic survival.[41]
As in Africa, white men were dependent on black women to service
their everyday needs. Such women also acted as a valuable conduit between
the slave and white economies and cultures. Thistlewood would not have
been so successful as the owner of a small-scale pen without the huckstering
(small-scale marketing and trading) skills of Phibbah and his other
entrepreneurial female slaves. When money was tight, he was helped by
loans from Phibbah, House Franke and Egypt Lucy.[42] Through black
women, white men also learnt about aspects of African-Caribbean culture
such as food, customs and oral traditions. Thistlewood was entertained
several times by ‘Mr Say’s Vine’ with ‘many diverting Nancy [Anansi] stories’
which she told ‘very cleverly’.[43] He also seems to have enjoyed watching
the ‘tricks’, including ‘Congo’ dancing, at his first ‘wife’ Marina’s
‘housewarming’, for which he gave provisions to ‘treat the Negroes ...
especially her shipmates’.[44] White men were much closer to slave women
than slave men and, through their ‘wives’, were forced to confront a
‘personhood’ of individual slaves which confounded the generalising and
dehumanising racist ideology of the era.
Higher status whites condemned such liaisons, decrying the fact that
white men appeared content with Negro or mulatto mistresses, producing a
‘spurious race of children’, whose maintenance, together with the
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extravagance of their ‘sable mothers’, dissipated men’s savings and wills.[45]
It was the house slaves who were most likely to gain the longer-term favours
of white men (as opposed to the field slaves who were convenient ‘quick
sex’). Thistlewood’s diaries chronicle many cruelties against women,
indicating that Phibbah and other favoured slave ‘wives’ were highly
privileged and exceptional even to the point of being able to refuse sex
without jeopardising their position. There are numerous references in
Thistlewood’s diaries to Phibbah refusing him – ‘would not come to bed ...
rather too saucy ... did not speak to me all day ... denied me’.[46] She was
rarely ‘reprimanded’ and maintained her position throughout her life.
However, even such privileged female slaves risked relegation to fieldwork
for refusal of sexual favours or displacement by a new favourite.
Sexual relations across racial boundaries were almost exclusively
between white men of all classes and black and coloured women, slave and
free. Thistlewood refers to one white man’s mother who ‘is kept by a Negro
man and has several children by him’ but the manner in which it is
recorded, as an interesting anecdote someone has told him, is arguably
indicative of its rarity value. Long alleged that ‘the common practice’ of
women in Europe forming ‘connections’ with Negro men’ (a reflection of the
substantial but primarily young, male black presence in England connected
with the growth of the slavery) was ‘very odious’ in the eyes of white Creole
women. John Stedman claimed if a white woman had intercourse with any
male slave, the woman was ‘forever detested’ and the slave lost his life
‘without mercy’.[47]
Yet, white men in the Caribbean do not appear to have demonised
black male sexuality, nor to have engaged in chivalric and emotive appeals
about the protection of ‘white womanhood’, to the same extent as their
counterparts in the slave-owning states of the southern USA. An anonymous
poem, ‘The Runaway’, quoted by the Jamaican planter, Matthew Lewis, is
perhaps revealing here:
Peter was a black boy;
Peter, him pull foot one day;
Buckra girl, him Peter’s joy;
Lilly white girl entice him away.
Fye, Miss Sally, fye on you!
Poor Blacky Peter why undo?
Oh! Peter, Peter was a bad boy;
Peter was a Runaway.
Him Missy him pray: him Massa so kind

Was moved by him prayer, and to Peter him say
‘Well, boy, for this once I forgive you! – but mind
With the buckra girls you no more go away!
Though fair without, they’re foul within;
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Their heart is black, though white their skin.

Then Peter, Peter with me stay;
Peter no more run away!’ [48]
Whereas it is usually black women who are depicted as the temptress, in this
poem it is a white woman. However, she has been depicted as ‘black within’,
emphasising the centrality of the ‘Sable Venus’ in defining the dangerous
sexuality in colonial society which led men into wickedness.
Black and white women’s lives and identities became mutually
intertwined within the harsh boundaries of white male patriarchy. Although
wealthier white women benefited from slave labour, they were relegated to
‘white shadows’ of the black women who became the objects of their
husbands’ lust and fantasies. What Beckles refers to as the white man’s
‘fetish for black women’ was not related solely to the lack of white women
but was an implicit element of masculinist ‘popular culture’, common also
among those married to white women. As John Stedman, observed, writing
of his experiences in Surinam in the late eighteenth century, white women
were regarded as ‘not very alluring’ and colonists preferred ‘Indian, Negro
and mulatto girls ... [for their] remarkable cleanliness, health, and vivacity’.
At a later date, during the anti-slavery ferment of the 1820s, the historian,
Thomas Babbington Macaulay, summed up the situation succinctly when he
condemned the ways in which defenders of slavery led the British public to
believe that white men were physically repelled by black women. In reality,
he stressed, white men in ‘torrid zones’ preferred black women and had
‘never found [them] too ugly to be concubines, only wives’.[49]
Viewed by white men as drab and dull in contrast to black or mulatto
women, it is not surprising that some white women felt intense envy which
surfaced in cruelty towards female slaves. John Stedman, claimed that even
innocent women, especially domestic slaves, suffered ‘many cruelties’ from
the ‘false accusations of ... lustful [white] women’ impelled by ‘groundless
jealousy’. Planters’ wives such as Mrs A.C. Carmichael, writing of her
experiences in Trinidad in the early nineteenth century, blamed the moral
ruin of white men on the seductive and conniving ways of black women. In a
similar vein, a white male observer alleged that competitive mulatto women
‘emulated and even strove to excel [white women] in splendour, taste and
expensiveness of dress’.[50] Such ‘competition’ between black and white
women and the contrasts of perceived sexualities and bodily attributes have
had profound long-term consequences for relations between black and white
women.
‘Whiteness’, and the ways in which it has been constructed in relation
to representations of blackness, has attracted greater academic interest in
the past decade.[51] During the slave era, constructions of a ‘purer’ white
womanhood were refined through contrasts with black women, particularly
the ‘Sable Venus’. White women’s identities were thus dependent on the
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existence of a parallel universe of black women. However, despite differences
of race and class, black and white women in the Caribbean shared a tenuous
link through their subordination to white male patriarchal power. Men who
were cruel and barbaric in their treatment of their slaves were also likely to
mistreat their own womenfolk.
Thistlewood’s fine eye for detail again presents us with a graphic
description of one such case, that of Mr Cole, who owned the neighbouring
Paradise and Egypt plantations and also ‘his’ Phibbah. Cole was a drunkard,
even grosser in his sexual appetites than Thistlewood and without the
latter’s redeeming and long-enduring fondness for Phibbah and her relations
and friends. His marriage appears typical of the loveless, pragmatic unions
men entered into during the eighteenth century. Hoping to use his wife’s
money to solve his financial problems, he showed utter contempt for her
feelings. Like other women, she had to openly face her husband’s sexual
licence with his female slaves, who were regularly whipped for refusing him.
Informed by another female slave that he had slept with a slave woman
whilst she was away, the young Mrs Cope ‘examined the sheets and found
them amiss’. It is clear that she confided her misery to Thistlewood, who
records:
Saturday, 9th Oct. 1756: Mr C. in his tantrums last night. Forced Egypt
Susanah in the cookroom: was like a madman most part of the night,
etc. Mrs Cope very ill today p.m. Dr. Gorse came to her and stayed all
night.[52]
In August 1782, Thistlewood learns that Cope ‘kicks Mrs. C out of bed &
openly takes girls of 8 or 9 years old etc.’ The source of Thistlewood’s
information was either Mrs Cope herself or other female slaves on the
Copes’ plantations close to his ‘family’. Other white wives would recognise
Mrs Cope’s personal distress and unhappiness. In her letters to William
King, an absentee plantation owner and London merchant, between 1825
and 1839, Mrs Lockhhart of Dominica records distress over the health of
her son, the infidelities of her planter husband and the sheer weight of debts
which increased her sense of insecurity.[53]
Slavery impacted negatively on the white minority in the Caribbean,
who were obsessed with the sexualised, productive and punishable bodies of
slaves but also the diseased bodies of black and white. ‘Debt, disease and
death’, wrote Maria Nugent, were the only topics of conversation in Spanish
Town. Visitors to the Indies commented adversely on the bizarre habits of
white Creoles and the way in which they had imbibed ‘bad habits’ from
living with ‘racially inferior’ people. The Creole lifestyle left much wanting, a
‘wild colonial’ ambience where white men could indulge in drink and sexual
debauchery (again, meticulously recorded in Thistlewood’s diaries). Little
seems to have changed by the late eighteenth century to refute Richard
Ligon’s observation that white men in Barbados were materialistic
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philistines, ‘solicitous to make money without appreciation of the finer

sensibilities of human existence’. White men were, in Maria Nugent’s words,
‘gross bores’ who ‘ate like cormorants and drank like porpoises’. She found
the Creole style unappealing, with uncomfortable houses, whose thin walls
offered little privacy from the ‘numerous Negroes, men, women and children
running and lying about it’.[54]
Cultural boundaries between black and white were constantly breached
in Creole society and there is even evidence of friendship between white and
black women. Mrs Sarah Bennett, the well-to-do owner of Paradise Pen, was
a close friend of Phibbah and gave her a ‘negro wench named Bess ... for
life’. Maria Nugent had female ‘coloured’ friends from whom she received all
the local gossip. In contrast to her scathing remarks about white Creole
women, she admired the vivacious and poised, free coloured women whom
she entertained at her ‘levees’. When Mrs Cole’s son died, it was female
slaves who ‘sat up’ with his body all night.[55] For white women, too, black
women were the main link with the ‘other’ culture of slave society. Despite a
limited social acceptance, however, the status and identity of even the most
privileged free coloured women remained circumscribed by race. As John
Stewart, an observer of early nineteenth-century Jamaican life, noted:
A few men of colour have been so far elevated above their caste by the
advantages of fortune as to be received into white society: but it very
rarely happens that a brown female is so admitted whatever her merit or
acquired advantages. If she has one drop of African blood in her veins ...
it operates as effectively to shut her out from ... society ... as a moral
stain in her character would do in European society.[56]
This ‘racial stain’ delineated an unbridgeable gulf between black and white
women, even though their identities were mutually shaped with cross-
reference to each other. Black women were always ‘wenches’ and even the
most privileged coloured women were only ever ‘Miss’, never ‘Mrs’.[57]
Poorer white women in Britain were also vulnerable to sexual exploitation,
prostitution, male violence and enforced transportation as criminal
‘wenches’ and their lives were arguably almost as wretched as those of slave
women. However, in the Caribbean, as in other colonised areas, such women
remained privileged by race, if not gender, and had greater possibilities of
upward mobility than in Britain.[58] White women of all classes were
culturally influenced by life in colonial society, but it was black women who
experienced the most profound and life-changing transformations.
In reconstructing some sort of life for themselves in bondage, slave
women’s reality was bounded by a ‘triple consciousness’ shaped by their
position as forced ‘migrant’ workers (‘drudges’), as the sexual objects of
white men (‘Sable Venus’) and in relation to their own black communities.
Given the existence of concubinage, some women had to skilfully navigate
between two cultures, African, or African-Creole, and white. Arguably they,
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and their sister ‘drudges’ in the field, were sustained through such
disorienting transformations by an African-oriented women’s culture which
differentiated them from slave men. A ‘woman-centred culture’, as defined by
Gerder Lerner, encompasses ‘friendship networks of women, their affective
ties, rituals and folk knowledge’.[59] Such a culture was vital to the
development of ‘oppositional’ identities which countered the ways in which
whites had constructed the black female in contemporary discourse. In
contemporary writings on the Caribbean, there is an increasing recognition
of the existence of two ‘sharply gendered cultural visions’, originating
during slavery and marked by ‘competition and struggle’, a deeply
significant ‘womanist culture’, which (since Emancipation) has been
overshadowed by the more dominant ‘masculinist culture’.[60]
The women in Thistlewood’s world were clearly immersed in the
shadowland of African rituals of which whites had little knowledge or
understanding. Phibbah’s daughter Coobah, before her conversion to
Christianity and ‘respectability’, was reprimanded for allowing ‘myal dances’
in her house in Paradise estate. When Phibbah’s sister, Nancy, held a ‘ball’
at Paradise estate, Phibbah attended, staying out overnight, although
Thistlewood could not ‘explain’ the reason for the occasion. Nancy also held
an ‘all-night, all day play’ on the death of her son with ‘much music and
dancing’.[61] Throughout his record, it is the women of the plantations and
pens in his neighbourhood who organise the ‘plays’ which marked the
significant rites of passage of the slaves – funerals, births, bestowing
protection on houses. Such ‘plays’ were accompanied by drumming, singing
and other ‘noisy’ Negro practices and the numbers attending reflected the
status slaves had in their own black world. Phibbah and her friends were
regular attenders.
How does the existence of such an African-centred ‘women’s culture’
contribute to a critical deconstruction of the stereotype of the ‘Sable Venus’?
It was the existence of this culture which arguably prevented white men
from ever gaining the full measure of black women, even those whom they
supposedly knew intimately through concubinage. Recognition of the
importance of African-derived cultural practices to slave women’s identities
enables us to more sensitively unravel the complexities of resistance,
collaboration and survival and leads us to question the degree to which
women who lived with whites acted solely from selfish, individualistic
motives. Dependency on white men and greater exposure to white ‘culture’
did not preclude solidarity with fellow slaves. The Jamaican planter, Edward
Long, writing in the 1770s, comments on the devious wiles of one black
‘harlot’:
All her kindred and most commonly her very paramours are fastened
upon her keepers like so many leeches, while she, the chief leech,
conspires to bleed [the white man] ... The quintessence of her dexterity
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consists of persuading the man she detests to believe she is violently

smitten with the beauty of his person.[62]
Black mistresses thus sustained their kin and friendship networks and used
their position to help other slaves. Mother–daughter bonds were particularly
strong and African slave women also retained strong links with their
‘shipmates’. Again, Thistlewood’s extremely detailed diaries offer insight.
Phibbah has regular contact with her daughter, Coobah, and her sister,
Nancy, both house slaves on Cole’s Egypt plantation, and Coobah’s
daughter, ‘Little Nancy’. She also visits and is visited by female slaves from
other plantations, including those who were also ‘kept’ by white men. When
Phibbah is ill, her daughter and other friends visit and tend to her. From
Thistlewood’s account of Phibbah’s social network, it is clear that she is the
fulcrum, and held in some esteem by local slaves. Phibbah also showed
concern for other slaves: Thistlewood recorded a ‘rare’ incidence in 1760
when he had to ‘reprimand’ her ‘for inter-meddling with the field Negroes
business with me’. Although, in other instances, she appeared to collude in
his maltreatment of certain female slaves, as Douglas Hall argues, it is
possible that she intervened to curb his more excessive cruelties.[63]
Other black women with whom Thistlewood had regular contact also
intervened on behalf of black men and kept him informed about cruelties
other white men perpetrated against female slaves. Thistlewood’s female
slave ‘confidantes’ also frequently had black lovers and at several points in
his diaries, he alludes to feelings of ‘jealousy’. If ‘sleeping with the enemy’
was a tactic for survival, the vision of freedom was arguably the goal that
burnt bright in the consciousness of black concubines and this could be
translated into support for revolt. During a serious rebellion in Jamaica in
1776, a trooper informed Thistlewood that ‘the head Negro women about
Lucea, even those kept by white men’ supported the rebels.[64]
‘She Devils’: the self-realisation of

black women in slavery and freedom
Assertions of cultural identity, resistance to sexual advances and support for
slave rebellions risked punishment and blurred the white-defined ‘Sable
Venus’/‘She Devil’ dichotomy, underscoring the vulnerability of all slave
women. In 1770, Thistlewood notes how:
Frazier’s Beck ... was tried for having a Supper and a great number of
Negroes at her house last Saturday night. Had her ear slit, 39 lashes
under the gallows, and 39 against the long stores.
Similarly, Bess, the slave girl ‘given’ to Phibbah by Mrs Bennett, gains
Thistlewood’s disapproval for ‘drumming on a gourd’ at night in one of the
Negro houses and he has words with Phibbah about her ‘ill-humours’. In
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recording these transgressions, Thistlewood unwittingly illuminates the
importance of slave women’s contribution to the survival and practice of a
dynamic, African-oriented slave culture, corroborated in other contemporary
accounts, which often brought them into conflict with their white
masters.[65]
Despite white men’s proximity to black women, any intimate
knowledge was acquired primarily through the women’s bodies, not their
minds. Thus, in both the slave-owner’s bed or tending his crops or house,
black women proved ‘concrete in their labour’, but ‘surreal in their
humanness’.[66] Whether for labour, profit, sex or pro- or anti-slavery
propaganda, white men ‘remade’ black women in a mould which suited their
own projects. Stripped thus of any meaningful identities, black women were
forced into ‘recreating’ themselves. Ironically, it is through a closer
examination of the most negative contemporary stereotype, the ‘She Devil’,
the troublesome, resistant woman, that we can glean deeper insight into
how black women confounded white stereotypes of both passive ‘drudge’
and compliant ‘Sable Venus’. Such resistance arguably represented the most
unambiguous retrieval of ‘personhood’ from the anonymous, commodified
bodies of the mass of slave women.
As colonial slavery matured, the passive ‘drudge’ stereotype of African
womanhood, so important in the early rationalisation of the use of female
slave labour, metamorphosed into the ‘She Devil’, the defiant and resistant
slave, symbolic of the ever-present threat of slave revolt. Whilst the
sexualised ‘Sable Venus’ deconstructed above was a ‘surreal’ fantasy of the
white male libido, the ‘She Devil’ reflected white men’s fears of black
women’s concrete resistance to ‘real’ labour. Outside the favoured status of
long-term concubine, the black woman, as indispensable worker, frequently
posed serious problems for slave managers, and female slave resistance from
the point of capture is well documented.[67] The ‘She Devil’ stereotype
referred not so much to outstanding rebel women, such as Nanny, the great
leader of the free Jamaican Maroons (descendants of Spanish slaves who had
escaped to the mountains during the early settlement of Jamaica), but to
what Hilary Beckles refers to as the ‘natural rebel’, who drew on her
everyday experiences as a basis for reclaiming self and identity.[68]
Thistlewood’s diaries provide plentiful examples of such resistance.
While he found certain male slaves intransigent, the problems with his
female slaves differed in kind and extent. Women were much more likely to
be ‘sulky’, quarrelsome and ‘very refractory’. In November 1778,
Thistlewood reports, ‘At night flogged Fanny and Nanny for fighting and
scolding’. The two crop up again in January 1782: ‘Flogged Nanny and
Franke for abusing Strap [the black driver or overseer] in the field; Fanny
for her exceeding impudence’. There were women who were always
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‘wanting’ (runaways) and Thistlewood’s response was to try to reassert

power over their bodies through flogging but also rebranding:
Saturday, 6th October, 1781: This morning had Mary flogged, put her
on a steel collar with a few links of chain to it, and marked her left
cheek TT ... hear she soon set off for the mountain again.[69]
Sally and ‘Burton’s Mary’ were his two most recalcitrant women. Mary was
purchased from Mr Samuel Burton in 1778 and described as 20 years of
age, ‘of the Chambah Country ... her ears are bored: tolerably black, with a
black mark under each eye ... 4ft. 11½ inches’. In May 1782, she ran away
and was not brought back until January 1784. Sally had been problematic
since 1770 when she was approximately 17 years old, habitually stealing
from the cookhouse. Phibbah, who was usually supportive of fellow slaves,
‘tied her hands behind her naked [at night in the cookhouse] for the
mosquitoes to bite’, possibly antagonised by Thistlewood’s sexual designs on
Sally. Sally escaped but was caught in a provision ground where
Thistlewood asserted his ‘droit de seigneur’ over her. Thus began a pattern
of stealing, running away, floggings and rape (he does not record paying her
any ‘favours’). In 1776, Sally, together with Fanny, Myrtilla and Dick, was
flogged for ‘evil doings’ (possibly a reference to African religious rituals or
the practice of Obeah). The pattern of stealing and floggings continued and,
in 1782, Sally had a miscarriage whilst she was having her collar taken
off.[70].
By 1784, Mary and Sally were being regularly punished, sometimes
together. On 22 January 1784, Thistlewood handcuffed Mary and secured
her in the ‘bilboes’ (stocks) after she was brought back from Lucea jail by a
male slave. The next day, Mary was released but Thistlewood had Sally
secured in a collar ‘with two prongs’. She was then ‘marked’ on each cheek
and sent into the field to work. By February, ‘Burton’s Mary’ fled once more,
as did Sally in July. After Sally was returned and flogged, she stole some of
Thistlewood’s peas to be sold on the market and disappeared again. When
she was returned by a Maroon [71], Thistlewood punished both of his
intransigent female slaves by putting a chain round Sally’s neck and locking
her ‘to Mary’s ... chains’ whilst they worked together during the day. Finally,
he had them carried away by his trusted male slave, Strap, to be offered for
sale, but, as only £50 was offered for both, they were brought back. We do
not know their ultimate fate, but Coobah (not Phibbah’s Coobah), another
persistent runaway and thief, was sold for £40 in 1774 and taken to
Savanna, Georgia. She had left behind a dead child, Sylvia.[72] Resale or
transportation to a strange environment must have compounded slave
women’s sense of disorientation and isolation, given the importance of
kinship and community ties to the psychic and material support of
individuals.
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Such extreme ‘insolence’ in women may have been prompted or
exacerbated by psychological trauma and/or sexual violation. Women like
Thistlewood’s Sally provide a glimpse into the ‘reality’ of a ‘She Devil’. The
abuse Sally suffered when aged approximately fifteen is clinically recorded
by Thistlewood when he punishes her for running away:
Note her private parts is tore in a terrible manner, which was discovered
this morning by her having bled a great deal where she lay in the
bilboes last night. Being threatened a good deal, she at last confessed
that a sailor had laid with her while away.
Thistlewood’s response is to put a collar on her and rebrand her on the
cheek. The compassion comes from another female slave, ‘Mr Say’s Vine’,
who ‘undertook’ to doctor her. As Hall notes, at the time Thistlewood was
himself attracted to Sally but this was not reciprocated, much to his
annoyance and disappointment.[73] Yet he persists in having sexual
intercourse with her. The horrors of Sally’s life must have been unbearable
and make her strong resistance even more understandable.
In the uncertain times during the transition to freedom, black women
were even more intensely demonised in defence of the fragmenting system.
‘Fierce young devils’ attacked drivers and were constantly accused of
‘insolence’ and quarrelling in the fields with other women. Punishment
record books kept during this period indicate that women were more likely
to be persistent offenders and that the whip was still being used to ‘control’
them despite ameliorative legislation passed in various islands which banned
this punishment for women. In 1823, John Wells, the attorney manager of
Baillies Bacolet plantation in Grenada, noted that ‘Eliza received 20 stripes
for violent behaviour in the field ... and for excessive insolence to myself
when reprimanding her in the presence of the gang’. The whip was still used
on women on the same plantation as late as 1833, although not, it seems, to
the same extent as in earlier years (Thistlewood noted women having as
many as 100 lashes). In addition to the whip, female slaves were also
punished by the ‘hand and foot’ stocks and being forced to wear the
collar.[74]
As the battle between pro- and anti-slavery factions intensified during
the 1820s, critics of slavery, male and female, depicted the slave woman as
an innocent victim of plantocratic sexual and economic exploitation, in need
of pity and protection, a humanitarian reworking of the anonymous, passive,
black female ‘drudge’.[75] After emancipation there was a strong movement,
promoted by abolitionists and missionaries, to create a vigorous and free but
also a ‘respectable’ (Europeanised) peasantry through Christian conversion.
The moralisation of black women through Christian marriage was crucial to
this project. The white plantocracy was also subjected to the new
metropolitan pressures to normalise colonial society through respectability
and ‘Victorian Values’ and there is evidence that concubinage declined.
780
When Anthony Trollope visited Jamaica in the 1850s, he regarded the white
planters as models of propriety.[76]
In freedom women remained central to defining the racial borders
between black and white but now their sexuality had to be actively
suppressed and the dangerous sexual borderlands between black and white
policed as a threat to the developing imperial order. However, although the
‘Sable Venus’ of the slave era disappeared, the attractive, sexualised,
younger African-Caribbean women retained an erotic appeal for white men
and remained prominent in travellers’ accounts of the ‘tropics’, contrasted
favourably with the ‘old negress’ who was ‘always hideous’ [77] and fit only
for labour and racist derision.
The era of freedom is not within the scope of this article, but as an
endnote and to reiterate a key theme, the change and continuity in black
women’s identities out of Africa and into the diaspora, it is pertinent to ask
what happened in freedom to all those defiant, insubordinate and actively
resistant women. How were identities of women changed and renegotiated?
With emancipation, the context and construction of the key stereotypes
which emerged during slavery changed but, whilst the ‘Sable Venus’ may
have disappeared, the ‘drudge’ and her more active and threatening alter
ego, the ‘She Devil’ arguably persisted. In freedom, the majority of black
women remained ‘de mules uh de world’ and continued to frustrate whites
as a metamorphosed version of ‘She Devils’, ‘females of abandoned
character’.[78] Women were prominent in riots throughout the post-
Emancipation era (for instance, in 1878, a serious labour revolt in
Roxborough, Tobago, known as the ‘Belmanna War’ was led by a female
labourer, Ti Piggy, who was finally shot) and female resistance post-
Emancipation is a developing area of research.[79]
Black women’s continued cultural resistance, combined with political
and labour protest in the public sector, suggests the failure of the white
moralising mission. The majority of women of African origin were excluded
from Western respectability and, as during slavery, remained close to their
African cultural roots. They continued to wear the most powerful visual
symbol of female African identity, the head-tie.[80] The ‘remaking’ of the
free black women by abolitionists thus had important implications for black
women’s gendered identities in relation to both black and white men but
also stimulated new assertions of black women’s self-defined identities
framed in African-derived cultural values and resistance to white oppression.
Conclusion
This article has demonstrated that whilst white representations of black
women changed over time, a core of negative stereotyping remained,
especially around black female sexuality and black women’s ‘drudge’ status,
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a ‘fabulous fiction’ of white-ascribed identities which still adversely impacts
upon contemporary black women’s identities. (The comments in autumn
1999 by Jeffrey Archer, the millionaire author, during his ill-fated campaign
as Conservative candidate for Mayor of London, about black women being
much more attractive than the shabby ‘drudges’ of yesteryear, are telling
here.) In the first two sections, I suggested that a key problem which faced
slave women was how to reconcile and negotiate opposed, fragmented and
conflicting identities, given the power of white-defined stereotypes to
condemn them to the lowest rank in the race/class hierarchy and their
vulnerable position on the sexual borderlands between black and white.
Sections two and three deconstructed contemporary white male
representations of the ‘Sable Venus’ and the ‘She Devil’ in order to
demonstrate that the retention of an African-centred culture, evident even
amongst women who ‘collaborated’ through concubinage, and the active
resistance of the ‘She Devil’ were crucial to black women’s self-realisation
and articulation of their own gendered identities and ‘personhood’. Black
women’s identities were constructed through ‘white visions’ of the black
world but were arguably also influenced by where individuals located
themselves in relation to the ‘counter-culture’ of the slaves and a ‘women’s
culture’ which threaded back to Africa.
My discussion has also raised issues relating to gender and whiteness
in suggesting that neither black nor white women’s identities can by fully
understood without reference to each other. Section two argued that the
sexual ‘otherness’ of the African woman, so desired by white men, was
central to defining white and black gendered identities in slavery and
freedom. However, class, as well as race is important in understanding the
interlinked identities of black, ‘coloured’ and white women. Poorer white
women may have been less privileged than the favoured black mistress but
were never ‘remade’ by the ‘fabulous fiction’ of white discourses, as were
black women. This ‘remaking’ was based on an assumption of the primitive
and animalistic nature of black women but also their status as owned bodies
over which whites had total power. Thistlewood sums this up when he writes
of his ‘wife’ Phibbah, ‘Pity her, For she is in Miserable slavery’.[81]
Finally, I have argued that certain white contemporary sources can
foster a more nuanced understanding of slave women’s identities if we ‘read
beneath’ the lines and retain a critical perspective of the discourse which
frames such accounts. However, valuable as such sources may be in helping
to unravel the complex relationship between African and European cultures
at the colonial margins, white records merely skim the surface of black–
black relationships. Moreover, no matter how much empathy we employ as
historians, such records can provide only limited insight into how black
women subjectively experienced the trauma of enforced migration and the
Hobbesian fabric of their everyday lives. Can we ever really get into the
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minds of slaves such as Thistlewood’s ‘Old Sybil, bit with a spider ...
delirious [and] singing her country’?[82] Arguably, any fuller realisation of
black women’s historic personas must also draw upon women’s ‘long
memory’ forged through slavery, an ‘Afro-feminist’ approach to black
women’s history. Memory, oral traditions and ‘sites of memory’ which
embrace cultural forms such as dance are now recognised as vital sources in
the history of oppressed groups who leave few written records.[83] This
opens up promising new ways of reconstructing the historical ‘personhood’
of black women and challenging long-enduring white stereotypes.
Notes
[1] Erna Brodber (1982) cited in Olive Senior (1992) Working Miracles:
women’s lives in the Caribbean, p. 41 (London: James Currey).
[2] Catherine Hall (1993) White Visions, Black Lives: the free villages of
Jamaica, History Workshop Journal, 36, pp. 100–133; Maya Angelou (1989)
I Dream a World: America’s black women, National Geographic, 176,
p. 209.
[3] For a discussion of these repercussions, see Barbara Bush (1996) History,
Memory, Myth? Reconstructing the History (or Histories) of Black Women in
the African Diaspora, in S. Newell (Ed.) Images of African and Caribbean
Women, pp. 9–38, Occasional Paper Number 4, University of Stirling,
Centre for Commonwealth Studies.
[4] Jan Nederveen Pietersie (1992) White on Black: images of Africans and
blacks in Western popular culture, pp. 15–17, 181 (New Haven: Yale
University Press).
[5] Douglas Hall (Ed.) (1992 reprint edition) In Miserable Slavery: Thomas
Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–8, p. 2 (London: Macmillan). Thistlewood
was a prolific diarist over more than 30 years and left copious volumes. This
is an edited version of his diaries.
[6] Nikolas Rose (1996) Identity, Genealogy, History, in Stuart Hall & Paul du
Gay (Eds) Questions of Cultural Identity, pp. 128–129 (London: Routledge).
[7] Thistlewood, 11 November1751, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, p. 35. See
also Rose, ‘Identity, Genealogy, History’, p. 129.
[8] Emilia Viotta da Costa (1994) Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: the
Demerara slave rebellion of 1823, pp. 170–171 (London: Yale University
Press); Thistlewood, 11 November 1751, cited in Hall, In Miserable Slavery,
p. 35; Rose, ‘Identity, Genealogy, History’, p. 129.
[9] Hilary McD. Beckles (1999) Centering Women: gender relations in
Caribbean slave society, pp. xi–xii, xvii–xviii (Oxford: James Currey;
Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers).
[10] See, for instance, Sir Hans Sloane (1707) A Voyage to the Islands of
Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christopher and Jamaica, 1, p. 68 (London:
783
Barbara Bush
2 vols). See also Edward Long (1774) The History of Jamaica, 2, p. 385
(London: 5 vols).
[11] Barbara Bush (1998) Lost Daughters of Afrik? Caribbean Women, Identity
and Cultural Struggles in Slavery and Freedom, in Mairie ni Flathuin (Ed.)
Legacies of Colonialism, pp. 17–41 (Dublin: Galway University Press).
[12] The mammy stereotype is clearly evident in a novel by Elliot Bliss (1934),
Luminous Isle (London: Cobden Sanderson), which is set in colonial
Jamaica in the inter-war years. For a study of stereotypes of black women in
the USA, see Diane Roberts (1994) The Myth of Aunt Jemima:
representations of race and region (London: Routledge). Twentieth-century
representations of Caribbean women are discussed in Bush, ‘History,
Memory, Myth’.
[13] John Adams (1822) Sketches taken during Ten Voyages to Africa between
the Years 1786 and 1800, p. 8 (London).
[14] Dr William Sells (1972 reprint edition) Remarks on the Condition of the
Slaves in the Island of Jamaica, p. 33 (Dublin: Irish Universities Press).
[15] Claire Robertson & Herbert Klein (Eds) (1983) Introduction, Women and
Slavery in Africa, pp. 7–8 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press).
[16] Gerda Lerner (1983) Women and Slavery, Slavery and Abolition, 4,
pp. 173–175.
[17] Robertson & Klein, Introduction, Women and Slavery, pp. 4–9. See also
David Brion Davis (1984) Slavery and Human Progress, p. 14 (Yale: Yale
University Press).
[18] Claude Meillassoux (1991) The Anthropology of Slavery: the womb of iron
and gold, p. 7 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; London: Athlone Press;
translated by Alide Dasnois).
[19] Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (1997 reprint edition) African Women: a
modern history, p. 5 (Boulder: Westview Press); Maria Rosa Cutrafelli
(1983) Women of Africa: roots of oppression, p. 146 (London: Zed Books).
[20] For a classic study of Creole culture, see Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1971)
The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press). The importance of kinship and cultural bonds
amongst women is discussed in Barbara Bush (1995) Slave Women in the
British Caribbean c.1700–1838; a perspective on identity, culture and
resistance, in Wim Hoogbergen (Ed.) Born out of Resistance: on Caribbean
cultural creativity (Utrecht: ISOR).
[21] Thomas Phillips, A Voyage Made in the Hannibal of London, 1693–4, cited
in Nigel Tattersall (1991) The Forgotten Trade: comprising the log of the
Daniel and Henry of 1700 and accounts of the slave trade from the minor
ports of England, 1698–1725, pp. 144, 320 (London: Jonathan Cape).
[22] Phillips, A Voyage Made in the Hannibal, p. 87.
[23] The Caulker family of the upper Guinea coast, for instance, was founded by
an alliance between a Sherbro princess, ‘Senora Doll’, and a factor, Thomas
784
Corker. See Walter Rodney (1969) Upper Guinea and the Origins of Africans
Enslaved in the New World, Journal of Negro History, 54, p. 345.
[24] Phillips, A Voyage Made in the Hannibal, p. 77; Richard Ligon (1657) A
True and Exact Account of the Island of Barbadoes, p. 45 (London).
[25] Orlando Patterson (1986) Slavery and Social Death: a comparative study,
pp. 56–58 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
[26] Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, p. 126.
[27] This may have been a result of her two trips to England where the link
between Christianity and freedom was much more firmly established.
[28] Felly Nkweto Simmonds (1996) Naming and Identity, in Delia Jarrett
Macauley (Ed.) Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism,
p. 110 (London: Routledge).
[29] Slave advertisements placed by Alexander Walker, Luana, St Elizabeth, The
Jamaica Mercury, 30 August 1779, 26 June 1779. For the use of aliases, see
also Viotta da Costa, Crowns of Glory, p. 11. Aliases are still common in
some parts of the contemporary Caribbean. In Trinidad, for instance, they
are reflected in obituaries in newspapers.
[30] There is a mushrooming literature on post-colonial identities, but,
conceptually, such literature has drawn substantially on key texts such as
Homi Bhabha (1994) The Location of Culture (London: Routledge).
[31] Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, p. 46. Interview with Toni
Morrison, cited in Paul Gilroy (1993) The Black Atlantic: modernity and
double consciousness, p. 221 (London: Verso). Postmodernist
conceptualisations of Creole culture are discussed, for instance, in Antonio
Benitez-Rojo (1992) The Repeating Island (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press) and Michael Dash (1998) The Other America: Caribbean literature in
a New World context (London: Charlotteville: University of Virginia Press).
[32] Mrs A.C. Carmichael (1833) Domestic Manners and Social Conditions of
the White, Coloured and Negro Populations of the West Indies, 1, p. 80
(London: 2 vols).
[33] Lerner, ‘Women and Slavery’, p. 176.
[34] P. Wright (Ed.) (1966) Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica
from 1801–1805, p. 74 (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica).
[35] Cartoon, Anon. Published by William Holland, London, 1808, in The Tobago
Museum, Scarborough, Tobago.
[36] Cited in Bryan Edwards (1801) The History, Civil and Commercial of the
British Colonies in the West Indies, 2, p. 33 (London: 5 vols). See also
Robert J.C. Young (1995) Colonial Desire; hybridity in theory, culture and
race, pp. 152–157 (London: Routledge).
[37] Matthew Gregory Lewis (1845) Journal of a Residence among the Negroes
of the West Indies, pp. 69–70 (London); John Stedman (1798) Narrative of
a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam,
1772–1777, 1, pp. 52–53 (London: 2 vols).
785
Barbara Bush
[38] Michel Foucault (1979 reprint edition) The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An
Introduction, pp. 103–107 (London: Allen Lane)
[39] Robin Blackburn (1997) The Making of New World Slavery, p. 407
(London: Verso); Phibbah’s Price: a Jamaican ‘wife’ for Thomas Thistlewood,
in Beckles, Centering Women, pp. 38, 41.
[40] Lerner, ‘Women and Slavery’, p. 189.
[41] Thistlewood’s Diaries, 31 January 1768, 5 July 1768, 2 January 1773, in Hall,
In Miserable Slavery, pp. 145, 158, 231.
[42] Ibid., pp. 125, 137, 218–219, 223–227. For a pioneering study of
huckstering (or higglering, as it is sometimes termed) and fuller definition,
see Sidney Mintz & Douglas Hall (1970) The Origins of the Jamaican
Internal Marketing System, in Sidney Mintz (Ed.) Papers in Caribbean
Anthropology (New Haven: Yale University Press).
[43] Thistlewood’s Diaries, 14 July 1768 to 27 September 1769, in Hall, In
Miserable Slavery, pp. 156–160. Anansi is a trickster spider of Asante
(Ghana) oral traditions and was brought to the Caribbean by Asante
(‘Ashantee’) slaves.
[44] Thistlewood’s Diaries, 23 June 1753, in ibid., p. 18.
[45] Thomas Atwood (1791) The History of Dominica, pp. 209–210 (London).
See also, Long, The History of Jamaica, 2, pp. 323–327.
[46] See, for instance, Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, p. 67.
[47] Long, The History of Jamaica, 2, pp. 211–213; Stedman, Narrative of a Five
Years Expedition, 2, p. 19; Thistlewood, 1 October 1780, in Hall, In
Miserable Slavery, p. 277.
[48] Cited in Lewis, Journal of a Residence, pp. 120–121.
[49] Thomas Babbington Macaulay (1827) The Social and Industrial Capacities of
Negroes, Edinburgh Review, 25, March, p. 402; Stedman, Narrative of a
Five Years Expedition, 2, pp. 162–163. See also, Beckles, Centering
Women, p. 41.
[50] John Stewart (1823) A View of Jamaica, pp. 173, 330–331 (London). See
also Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition, 2, p. 112; Carmichael,
Domestic Manners, p. 71.
[51] See, for instance, Sander Gilman (1986) Black Bodies, White Bodies, in
Henry Louis Gates Jr (Ed.) Race, Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press); Ruth Frankenburg (1993) White Women: race
matters: the social construction of whiteness (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press); Barbara Trepagnier (1994) The Politics of Black and
White Bodies, in Kum-Kum Bhavnani & Ann Phoenix (Eds) Shifting
Identities, Shifting Racisms: a feminism and psychology reader (London:
Sage); Richard Dyer (1997) White (London: Routledge); Heloise Brown,
Madi Gilkes & Ann Kaloski-Naylor (Eds) (1999) White?Women: critical
perspectives on gender and race (London: Raw Nerve).
786
[52] Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, p. 72. For key studies of white
women’s lives in slave society, see Beckles, Centering Women, Part 2 and
Cecily Jones’s work on white women in Barbadian plantation societies in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (in Brown et al, White?Women).
[53] Letters to William King, 1825–1839, Atkin’s Slavery Collection, Wilberforce
House, Hull; Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, p. 29.
[54] Lady Nugent’s Journal, pp. 76, 80–81; Ligon, A True and Exact Account,
p. 107.
[55] Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, pp. 121, 137; Lady Nugent’s
Journal, pp. 55, 68, 90.
[56] Stewart, A View of Jamaica, p. 335.
[57] See, for instance, Barbara Bush (1981) White ‘Ladies’, Coloured ‘Favourites’
and Black ‘Wenches’: some consideration on sex, race and class in white
Creole society in the British Caribbean, Slavery and Abolition, 2,
pp. 243–262.
[58] See, for instance, Hilary Beckles (1993) White Women and Slavery in the
Caribbean, History Workshop Journal, 36, pp. 66–83. For the experiences
of white women transportees in the Caribbean, see Carl Bridenbaugh &
Roberta Bridenbaugh (1972) No Peace beyond the Line: the English in the
Caribbean, 1640–1690 (New York: Oxford University Press). Contemporary
insight into the lives of poorer white women can be found in Daniel Defoe’s
Moll Flanders, pp. 352–399 (London: Penguin, 1989; first published 1722),
and the experiences of white female convict labour in Australia are
convincingly evoked in Jane Rogers (1995) Promised Lands (London, Faber
& Faber).
[59] Gerda Lerner (1986) The Creation of Patriarchy, pp. 242–246 (New York:
Oxford University Press).
[60] James A. Arnold (1994) The Erotics of Colonialism in Contemporary French
West Indian Literary Culture, New West Indian Guide (NWIG), 68, p. 5. For
the broader background, see Senior, Working Miracles.
[61] Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, pp. 72, 217.
[62] Long, The History of Jamaica, 2, p. 331.
[63] Thistlewood, 11 January 1760, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, p. 94. See also
Hall, in ibid., p. 7.
[64] Thistlewood, 11 January 1760, 22 July 1776, in ibid., p. 243.
[65] Thistlewood, 2 November 1770, 3 November 1771, in ibid., pp. 226, 212. For
a discussion of women and cultural resistance, see, for example, Bush, ‘Lost
Daughters of Afrik’.
[66] Angelou, ‘I Dream a World’, p. 209.
[67] See, for example, Lucille Mathurin (1975) The Rebel Woman in the British
West Indies during Slavery (Kingston: Institute of Jamaica); Hilary McD.
Beckles (1989) Natural Rebels; a social history of enslaved women in
Barbados (London: Zed Books); Barbara Bush (1990) Slave Women in
787
Barbara Bush
Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Oxford: James Currey). Emilia Viotta da
Costa, in Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood, also refers frequently to resistant
women. For a useful overview of relevant historiography, see Bridget
Brereton (1992) Review Article: searching for the invisible woman, Slavery
and Abolition, 13, pp. 86–96.
[68] Beckles Centering Women, p. xviii.
[69] Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, pp. 260, 286, 288.
[70] Thistlewood, in ibid., pp. 254, 282–283.
[71] After armed struggle during the eighteenth century, the Maroons had
secured their freedom in return for promising to restore all runaway slaves
to their masters.
[72] Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, pp. 194–195, 198–199, 200, 289,
290, 297, 300–301.
[73] Thistlewood, 22 August 1768, in ibid., pp. 149, 150.
[74] Record of Punishment, Baillies Bacolet Plantation, Grenada, 1823, 1833,
Atkins Slavery Collection, Wilberforce House, Hull.
[75] For instance, the Birmingham-based Ladies Society For the Relief of Negro
Slaves declared that slave women lacked male protection and were
prevented from leading the lives of ‘normal good wives’ as the victims of
male white lust. See Clare Midgley (1992) Women against Slavery: the
British campaigns, 1780–1870, p. 28 (London: Routledge).
[76] Anthony Trollope (1858) The West Indies and the Spanish Main, p. 44
(London: Chapman Hall). See also, Susan Lowes (1995) ‘They Couldn’t
Mash Ants’: the decline of the white and non-white elites in Antigua,
1834–1900, in Karen Fog-Olwig (Ed.) Small Islands, Large Questions:
society, culture and resistance in the post-Emancipation Caribbean,
pp. 41–42 (London: Frank Cass).
[77] J.A. Froude (1888) The English in the West Indies, p. 105 (London:
Longman’s, Green and Co.) For a discussion of the relationship between
sexuality, race and imperialism in the later Victorian era, see Anne
McClintock (1995) Imperial Leather: race, gender and sexuality in the
colonial contest (London: Routledge).
[78] See, for instance, Swithin Wilmot (1995) Females of Abandoned Character?
Women and Protest in Jamaica, 1836–35, in Verene Shepherd, Bridget
Brereton & Barbara Bailey (Eds) Engendering History: Caribbean women
in historical perspective (London: James Currey). The term ‘mule uh de
world’ is attributed to Zora Neale Hurston, who visited Jamaica in the 1930s
and commented on poor black women’s lives of toil but also on how they
drew their strength from their African-centred women’s culture and
networks (Delia Jarrett Macauley in Jarrett Macaulay [Ed.] Reconstructing
Womanhood, pp. 47, 51).
[79] See, for instance, Mimi Sheller (1998) Quasheba, Mother, Queen: black
women’s public leadership and political protest in post-Emancipation
Jamaica, 1834–65, Slavery and Abolition, 19, pp. 75–89. Olive Senior in
788
Working Miracles also gives several examples of black female resistance

continuing into the twentieth century (e.g. p. 150). Information about Ti
Piggy from the Tobago Museum, Scarborough, Tobago. Belmanna was in
charge of the militia which fired on the workers.
[80] Bush, ‘History, Memory, Myth?’, pp. 11–12. The cultural significance of the
head-tie to women of African-Caribbean origin is discussed in Carol Tulloch
(2000) That Little Magic Touch: the headtie and issues around Black British
women’s identity, in Kwesi Owusu (Ed.) Black British Culture and Society:
a text reader (London: Routledge).
[81] Thistlewood, in Hall, In Miserable Slavery, p. 68.
[82] Ibid., p. 35.
[83] See, for instance, Genevieve Fabre & Robert O’ Meally (Eds) (1995) History,
Myth and Memory in African American Culture (London: Blackwell);
Gabriel Entiope (1996) Negres, Danse et Resistance: La Caraibe du XVII’
au XIX’ siecle (Paris: L’Harmattan). Also relevant is Rosalyn Terborg Penn
(1995) Through an Afro-Feminist Political Lens: viewing Caribbean women’s
history cross-culturally, in Shepherd et al, Engendering History, pp. 25–49.
BARBARA BUSH is Reader in History in the School of Humanities and

Social Sciences at Staffordshire University, College Road, Stoke-on-Trent
ST4 2DE, United Kingdom (b.j.bush@staffs.ac.uk), where she teaches
courses on Imperial, African and African Diaspora History at undergraduate
and postgraduate level. Her publications on slave women include Slave
Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (James Currey, 1990); The Family
Tree is not Cut: women and cultural resistance in slave family life in the
British Caribbean, in Gary Y. Okihiro (Ed.) Resistance Studies in African,
Caribbean, Latin American and Afro-American History (Stanford
University Press, 1987) and ‘Hard Labour’: women, childbirth and resistance
in Caribbean slave societies, in David Barry Gaspar & Darlene C. Hine (Eds)
More than a Chattel: black women and slavery in the Americas (Indiana
University Press, 1996). Her most recent key publications are Imperialism,
Race and Resistance: Africa and Britain, 1919–45 (Routledge, 1999) and
‘Britain’s Conscience on Africa’: white women, race and imperial politics in
inter-war Britain, in Clare Midgley (Ed.) Gender and Imperialism
(Manchester University Press, 1998).
789

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Women's History Review

ISSN: 0961-2025 (Print) 1747-583X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwhr20

‘Sable venus’, ‘she devil’ or ‘drudge’? British

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‘Sable Venus’, ‘She Devil’ or

human beings in particular sites and practices’. The individual, he argues,

Race, Gender and Identity: from Africa to the Caribbean

become more prevalent in popular culture through the dominance of the

But relations between African women and white men sharply

of human progress’. The argument that Caribbean slavery created new,

Deconstructing the ‘Sable Venus’:

Do thou in gentle Phibia smile,

the child she bore to Thistlewood. Robin Blackburn suggests that

Him Missy him pray: him Massa so kind

Their heart is black, though white their skin.

philistines, ‘solicitous to make money without appreciation of the finer

consists of persuading the man she detests to believe she is violently

‘She Devils’: the self-realisation of

‘wanting’ (runaways) and Thistlewood’s response was to try to reassert

Working Miracles also gives several examples of black female resistance

BARBARA BUSH is Reader in History in the School of Humanities and

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