Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (33 page)

The last executions for witchcraft in England took place in 1682. Temperance Lloyd, a senile shopkeeper, was accused of casting spells and having sex with “the devil in the likeness or shape of a black man.” Lloyd also had “in her secret parts two teats hanging nigh together like unto a piece of flesh that a child had sucked.” She readily confessed, adding that she had indeed suckled a black man who had the mouth of a toad but sometimes changed himself into a bird. Her beggar codefendants also confessed to witchcraft. The jury found them guilty despite the skepticism of the judge, who worried that their confessions were in fact a form of suicide. Thirteen years later, an English lawyer had the nerve to argue in court that belief in witchcraft should be seen as a thing of the past. By 1736, the English laws mandating death for witches were repealed. No longer was it a capital crime to be a witch. From that point forward, it was forbidden (under much less severe sentences) to
act
like one. By the mid-eighteenth century, witch hunts on the Continent had also mostly stopped.
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6

THE NEW WORLD OF SEXUAL OPPORTUNITY

L
ATE ONE NIGHT in 1830, in New Kent County, Virginia, two black slaves named Peggy and Patrick burst into the house of their owner, John Francis, bearing weapons. Patrick immediately went after his owner with an axe while Peggy beat Francis with a large stick. Whether or not Francis was killed with these weapons we cannot know for sure, as the slaves set the house on fire as they left and it burned to the ground with Francis inside. It was not long before Peggy and Patrick were identified (along with two accomplices) as the arsonists/killers. The evidence—mostly taken from the verbal accounts of other slaves—soon began to mount against them. One slave had seen Peggy and Patrick enter the Francis house with their weapons. Another slave, a girl named Sucky, had been in the house when Peggy and Patrick had entered and confirmed that they had used straw to set the structure ablaze. Yet another slave had seen them searching the remains of Francis’s house for money after the attack.

The trial of Peggy and Patrick should have been simple and a guilty verdict assured: There was no worse crime in the antebellum South than the murder by a slave of his master, and the law made it almost impossible for black people to find justice anyway. No black person could ever testify against a white person, regardless of the circumstances, so even a free black woman who had been raped by whites had no way of proving the crime happened. Enslaved women such as Peggy were the most powerless of all. They practically existed to be abused by their masters. “We do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from de whip,” explained one Georgia slave woman to an English newcomer. “When [the master] made me follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no?”

Under normal circumstances, Peggy would end up hanged—a sentence judges imposed because it was the only result the law allowed. However, there was something different about this case that made the local white community uncomfortable. Peggy had brutally murdered her master and burned his house down, but she nevertheless gained the support of one hundred local white men, including one of the judges in her trial, who signed a petition to Virginia’s governor pleading for her life to be spared.

Slave women were in no position to refuse their owners’ sexual demands. As a long-suffering Virginia slave woman explained to her daughter: “[A] nigger ’oman couldn’t help herself, fo’ she had to do what der marster say.” Reprisals or resistance by slaves against their masters often ended in violence. Yet the men who advocated for Peggy knew what the strict letter of the law ignored: that even in the pathological matrix of white-black sexual relations, there had to be limits. This case defined the boundary beyond which even a slave owner such as John Francis must not go.

It was common knowledge among his neighbors that Francis had kept Peggy chained to a block in one of his farm buildings. He demanded repeatedly that she have sex with him, which she refused to do. It was also known that Francis beat her savagely, and that he threatened, if she continued to rebuff him, to thrash her until she was nearly dead, after which he would sell what remained of her in the slave market. Moreover, as everyone from the justice of the peace to Peggy herself knew, Francis was Peggy’s father. While Peggy was hardly the first person to have been conceived through master-slave sex, her father’s sexual demands were too much to bear for her; resisting them was worth killing and dying for.

Notably, no one did anything to help Peggy while Francis was alive. Slave owners regularly tortured their recalcitrant slave women, as was their prerogative. (Another Virginia slave woman of the same era who had “’fuse[d] to be a wife” to an overseer was suspended by her arms and whipped in punishment.) Any outside meddling in Francis’s treatment of Peggy could have been considered as interference with his sacred ownership of property, no different from preventing him from using his land or farm equipment. In addition, despite Francis’s cruelty to Peggy, no one who signed the petition believed she should be let off the hook legally. They all expressed “utmost abhorrence” at what she had done. Rather than hanging Peggy as the law demanded, however, they suggested that she be banished from the United States, which they said would “have the same good effect on Society” as her death. In the end, this was indeed Peggy’s fate. She and about twenty other slaves (including Patrick) were sold by the state to traders, and never heard from again. John Francis’s heirs were then presumably reimbursed by the state of Virginia for the loss of a valuable slave.

Peggy’s attack on John Francis sparked a furor among the whites of New Kent County, to be sure, but it never caused anyone to question that state’s color-coded system of sexual abuse. Slaves were commonly fathered by their owners, and slave women such as Peggy’s mother had no right to resist. Sex between white men and black or mixed-race (commonly called “mulatto”) females carried none of the traditional restrictions that governed relations between whites. Furthermore, a slave woman’s children were legally illegitimate, regardless of who the father was. While a white master’s wife or daughter was held to the high standards of sexual propriety, none of that applied to the women who tilled his fields and cleaned his chamber pots. Peggy had a white father, but she was black enough to be a sexual target. Despite the sympathies her case caused, no one tried to spare her any suffering in the future. She was sold to the highest bidder, and her next master might be expected to take full sexual advantage of his new acquisition.
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By 1831, when Peggy was auctioned off, whites had been exploiting women of color in the New World for more than three centuries. Starting with the first arrivals of Spanish and Portuguese explorers and continuing through waves of French, English, and Dutch settlers and profiteers, sexual relations between Europeans and dark-skinned females were both plentiful and charged with power politics. Sex was an instrument of conquest, a prize of victory and a relief from the restrictive mores of home. The New World was not only conquered at the tip of a sword or the barrel of a gun; it was brought down every bit as much (in the choice words of historian R. C. Padden) by the
membrus febrilis
(“feverish member”) of white men. White men played out violent sexual fantasies they could never have considered at home without having to fear for their lives.

Copious sex with supposedly insatiable native women was a key lure for libidinous European men to risk their lives crossing the oceans. The contrast with life at home could not have been starker. As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation ground on in Europe, brothels closed everywhere and punishments for even minor sexual transgressions increased. Never before had the disconnect between desire and law been wider or more dangerous to manage. A man might find himself whipped in public for causing an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, banished from his town for committing adultery, or even threatened with death for having too adventurous sex with his own wife. Something had to give, and one escape route was to the lands of the proverbial Amazons. Far from the prying eyes of neighbors and vice patrols, the New World shined with the allure of sexual paradise, a humid playpen filled with panting women ready to serve white men. “They esteem it a breach of Hospitality, not to submit to everything [the white man] desires of them,” held one report. For men with little to lose, that was enough.

Of course, it was a puerile myth that any women were waiting to service white men from across the seas. The reality was that violence (either actual or threatened) was usually necessary to convince native women to submit to the Europeans’ overheated sexual needs. To choose one example out of millions, Thomas Thistlewood left England in 1750 under the cloud of an arrest warrant for fathering a bastard child. He ended up as a slave overseer (and compulsive diarist) in Jamaica, where he had sex 1,774 times with 109 women over a thirteen-year period—probably every female under his control except the very young and the elderly. Thistlewood was typical in his carnal appetites and readiness to use violence to have his way with slave women. Nowhere in England were such risk-free sexual opportunities available, especially for someone of his low social station. He died in Jamaica after thirty-six consequence-free years of sexual opportunism.

European governments adapted their laws to permit their men to sexually maraud the New World almost unimpeded. Over the centuries, however, the picture became increasingly complicated. The vast territories of the Americas and Africa were not mere enemy towns to be sacked and then deserted. The Europeans had come to stay, and in so doing they were required to develop institutions to permit their men to vent their impure desires while simultaneously building a neo-European society. As the fates of Peggy and the slaves under Thislewood’s control attest, that effort was built on the bodies of dark-skinned people.
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THE SEXUAL ATTRACTION OF THE WEST

In addition to contributing his name to the landmasses of the Western Hemisphere, the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci counted among his accomplishments the promotion of the New World as a giant sexual resort. One of his travel accounts, written in about 1504, told of the insatiable women of Hispaniola (the island comprising modern-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), who used magical insect venom to engorge their men’s penises, inflating them to such proportions that they sometimes fell off. With native men unable to satisfy their females, the time was ripe for European men to come and take charge. The women, Vespucci promised, were ready and waiting for the white men to take them; indeed, they were so fond of “Christians” that “they debauch and prostitute themselves.”

Vespucci was not the only pimp for the unwitting women of the New World. According to other early accounts, the entire region was a female body begging to be taken. Emphasizing the interplay of sex and plunder, Sir Walter Raleigh described Guyana as a “country that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought.” The fresh women of Brazil, reportedly given as gifts to Europeans by their fathers, were like “colts who had never experienced a rein.” The natives of Virginia were also there for the taking—after an evening’s entertainment, a white stranger could hope to find bliss:

[A] Brace of young Beautiful Virgins are chosen, to wait upon him that night for his particular refreshment. These Damsels are to Undress this happy Gentleman, and as soon as he is in Bed, they gently lay themselves down by him, one on one side of him, and the other on the other.

Other accounts were more candid in reporting that native women needed to be forced to submit to the desires of European men. The women of Brazil, said one explorer, offered “little resistance against those who assault them.” The “assault” was most likely rape, but that was no more forbidden than using physical discipline on an unbroken horse. In fact, violence was part of the attraction. An account of an Italian noble who accompanied Christopher Columbus on a voyage to the West Indies, and to whom Columbus had “given” a “very beautiful Carib woman,” detailed the way brutal sex was eroticized:

When I had taken her into my cabin she was naked—as was their custom. I was filled with my desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But—to cut a long story short—I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she set forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually, we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought she had been brought up in a school for whores.

SOMETIMES THE FORCE was exerted by local chieftains who gave their girls to the European arrivals as “gifts” and “peace offerings.” The girls were then redistributed among the ships’ crews according to rank.

Between these encounters and Peggy’s murder of John Francis in 1830, white men perpetrated millions of rapes against women of color. All of them, by greater or lesser degrees, affirmed sex as a means of racial and cultural domination. Native and African females were viewed as human in shape, but not in soul: Either they were programmed to crave white flesh or they could be brought to submission readily, and without penalty. One early Spanish conquistador sired thirty children with indigenous women in just three years; had any of the women fought back they would have risked whipping, dismemberment, or—if they could not be brought to heel—death.
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For the Europeans, supposed female licentiousness represented opportunity. Male homosexuality, on the other hand, was godless and perverse. The first account of it in the New World came in 1494, just two years after Columbus’s first voyage west. The explorer’s doctor reported that Carib men castrated the boys they captured from enemy tribes, keeping the eunuchs on hand to abuse sexually. When the boys grew to adulthood, according to the doctor, the Caribs killed and ate them. In 1513, two days before “discovering” the Pacific Ocean, the conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa stormed a village in what is now Panama, killing the local king and butchering six hundred of the king’s warriors. As he entered the king’s house, Balboa reportedly found the king’s brother and some of his men dressed as women and engaging in what he called “preposterous Venus.” Balboa immediately captured the offending men, about forty in all, and fed them to his dogs.