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Bush, Barbara. “African Caribbean Slave Mothers and Children: Traumas of Dislocation and Enslavement Across the Atlantic World.” Caribbean Quarterly (March-June, 2010), Vol. 56, No. ½, 69-94.
Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom details what she claims is the missing historical focus upon gender as a key element of slave resistance in the antebellum south. Camp places slave women into unique positions of both “agents and subjects, persons and property, and people who resisted and who accommodated.” (Camp, 1) Camp’s argument centers around the ideas of geographic space and the slave’s body. According to Camp, everyday rebellious actions drove slave resistance to southern institutions and elements of control. Slaves did not just run away, but had secret night parties, made and wore specially made clothing, harbored fugitives, and supported or displayed abolitionist propaganda. Slaves used whatever geographic or spatial space available to resist their position–even if that meant only running away for a short period of time to just come back later.
While Camp deals primarily with the slave women of southern society, Barbara Bush discussed a broader Atlantic world perspective on slavery’s gender issues. Specifically, Bush focused on the story of slavery’s mothers and their ability or desire to forge new cultural identities. Bush traced her argument about the importance of birth within African cultural “fulfilment of female adulthood and fertility.” (Bush, 72) By going back to the African continent Bush allows for slave resistence to take on an element of cultural retention. Bush argued that even though the slaves were transported across the Atlantic, there was not a complete accommodation into new structures or societies. Slaves, according to Bush, continued their “African-derived conceptions of motherhood” and resisted attempts to change their core identities. (Bush, 70) Bush contends that even though the slave trade disrupted African life, slaves used similar cultural structures to protect and preserve the lives of children born on slave ships and on plantations. Bush uses a specific focus on African culture to defend the ideas that motherhood was one of the central core elements of African culture and strength. Because of the strength that mothers held in African communities, this translated to the plantations as women took an even more central role to slave life and survival. Elder slave women were charged on the plantation to take care of infants and younger children. Even Camp supported this claim that on the plantation women were less likely to be truant because of the fact that they were tied to family roles. Bush gave slave women significant agency by placing the argument together with the idea that slaves transplanted African cultural norms of childrearing in a village setting. Slavery disrupted African society and transplanted African women into the new society of the slave plantations. These women did not just accommodate or allow cultural norms to disappear. Instead, they developed systems and structures that allowed for mothering and parenthood that Bush argued “crossed the Middle Passage with the enslaved captives.” (Bush, 75-77) Bush even argued that enslaved women would enter into “concubinage relationships with European men” so that they either would be treated more favorably or perhaps have a better opportunity to win their freedom. (Bush, 83) In both cases the role of the mother became a central part of slave resistance to women’s positions on the slave plantation.
Bush claimed that there was also evidence that enslaved women in Barbados actually transplanted their child carrying techniques (they used their hips instead of arms) onto the islands as white women were known to carry their children in the same ways as the slaves. Bush commented that the survival of the older customs is “remarkable, given the pressures on women and the forces constantly undermining family life.” (Bush, 83-84) Because of the lack of father figures for many slave families on plantations, mothers were forced to take on roles that provided the necessary “psychic and material support for one another.” (Bush 84) This would actually constitute an adaptation as Bush claimed there was no precedent for female dominated societies in Africa–or at least not societies that centered around networks of “quasi-’kin’” as Bush claimed. (Bush, 84) Women in the Caribbean plantations worked together in networks of elder and younger women in order to adapt to the lack of men or father figures that may have been present in Africa. Bush claimed that these adaptations to the slave system created unique, yet still non-European, communities that lasted long after slavery ended.
Slave resistance was more than just running away, having secret parties, making clothing or harboring fugitives. Slaves responded to their position by creating new lives and starting families. Slave women resisted by supporting one another from the moment they arrived on slave ships to the plantations throughout the Caribbean and Antebellum South. Slave women used their positions within a maternal structure to resist the damaging elements of slavery upon the community. Regardless of sale or transfer of male members of the family, mothers and “grandmother” figures came together in the Caribbean south and women played a central role in the resistance to slavery’s challenges.