Closer to Freedom

Chapter 3 examines illegal parties held by enslaved people and the complex preparation and truancy that these parties required.

Camp provides a brief history of the corporeal rhetoric and politics surrounding enslaved women. In contrast to “proper” European women, who were assumed to be incapable of manual labor, Europeans viewed African women as “natural” candidates for enslavement, with their bodies represented as primarily laboring by the English since the middle of the 17th century. Reproduction and the labor of giving birth, too, came “naturally” to African women. In addition, African women traditionally were agricultural workers, so they were presented as “fit” for enslavement.

As early as 1643, a Virginia law declared free African women’s labor taxable, alongside the labor of European men. This distinguished African women from European women, who performed domestic work and whose labor was untaxed. Two years later, African men’s labor became taxable. By the late 1600s, African servants who had arrived “by shipping” could be forced into lifelong servitude. This law, in concert with a 1667 law banning the former manumission of servants converting to Christianity, codified the racialization of American slavery. By the 19th century, enslaved people were often referred to only by their laboring body parts or tools integral to their labor; thus, they were reduced to “hands” or, for women who worked agriculturally with hoes, referred to only as “hoes.