|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Women resisted | |
| Clara Slave women's lives in the big house constituted a dense pattern of day-to-day resistance. Clara used her position in the big house to search for bullets for her son, who intended to murder his master. He succeeded, and she was convicted with him. Among slave women, poison was a much more common weapon than bullets.
Harriet Tubman was a field hand on Maryland's Eastern Shore. She was whipped frequently and when her master died she heard that along with her brothers she was to be sold to the Deep South. She tried to persuade her brothers and her husband, a free man of five years, to accompany her in her escape to the North. She set out alone when they refused. The year was 1849. Walking at night, hiding by day, she reached Pennsylvania. "I had crossed de line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but dere was no one to welcome me to de land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in de old cabin quarter, wid de ole folks and my brudders and sisters. "But to dis solemn resolution I came; I was free, and dey should be free also; I would make a home for dem in de North, and de Lord helping me, I would bring dem all dere." In Philadelphia and in Cape May, New Jersey, Harriet Tubman worked as cook, laundress, and scrubwoman, saving her money in order to return to the South. In 1850 she went to Baltimore to rescue a sister and her children who were about to be sold. A few months later, she brought away a brother and two other men. In 1851 she returned for John Tubman [her husband], only to find that he had taken another wife and refused to see her. Reluctant to discuss this painful episode, Harriet mentioned it only briefly during an interview in 1865... In the course of nineteen trips into slave territory, Harriet Tubman led six of her brothers, their wives and fiances, nieces, nephews, and, in 1857, her elderly parents to freedom. |
 Dorothy Sterling records slave women's resistance in We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century:
'Fight, and if you can't fight, kick; if you can't kick, then bite,' one slave advised her daughter. A sizable minority of 'fighting, mule-headed' women refused to 'take foolishness' from anybody.'
"I stayed in the woods. Sometimes I'd go so far off from the plantation I could not hear the cows low or the roosters crow. I slept on logs. I had moss for a pillow; and I tell you, child, I wasn't scare of nothing. I could hear bears, wild-cats, panthers, and every thing. I would come across all kinds of snakes--moccasin, blue runner, and rattlesnakes--and got used to them. "One night a mighty storm came up; and the winds blowed, the rain poured down, the hail fell, the trees was torn up by the roots and broken limbs fell in every direction; but not a hair on my head was injured, but I got as wet as a drowned rat. Next day was a beautiful Sunday, and I dried myself like a buzzard. "Many times I'd find out where the hands on the place were working, and if the overseer was away I'd get something from them. I had a flint-rock and piece of steel, and I could begin a fire any time I wanted. Sometimes I'd get a chicken and would broil it on the coals and would bake ash-cake. "The weather was beginning to turn cold, and I made me a moss bed just like a hog, and I kept warm at night. But many times I used to sleep in the chimney-corners on the plantation next to my marster's."
Sometime in 1850 Robert Newsom, a slaveholder, purchased Celia, who was at the time approximately fourteen years of age. Shortly after purchase, he raped Celia and from the beginning, Newsom regarded her as both his property and his concubine. For five years, he made repeated sexual assaults on her. She gave birth to two children, one, probably both, fathered by him. When a slave called George became her lover, she tried to effort to stop Newsom's sexual advances by first asking daughters of the slaveholder for help, to no avail. She then asked Newsom himself to stop and warned that she'd hurt him if he continued. Celia directly confronted him sometime on or immediately before June 23, 1855. Newsom brushed aside her request and, as if to emphasize his right to sex with her, informed Celia that 'he was coming to her cabin that night.' Celia threatened to hurt him if he made further sexual demands of her. After her confrontation with him she obtained a large stick, which she placed in the corner of her cabin.
As Newsom approached her, Celia retreated before him into a corner of the house. With one hand she raised the stick and brought it down against his head... Afraid that an angered Newsom would harm her, she raised the club with both hands and once again brought it crashing down on Newsom's skull, thus killing him. To dispose of the body she burned it in the fireplace in her cabin.
|
"I had to pick one hundred and fifty pounds of cotton every day
or get a whipping. One night I got up just before day and run
away.
At approximately ten o'clock later that night,...Newsom ...walked
the sixty or so paces to Celia's cabin. He entered the cabin.
There was a confrontation.