Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans

By Emily A. Owens

In histories of enslavement and in Black women's history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence against Black women was virtually unregulated—even normalized—a vast economy developed specifically to sell the sexual labor of Black women. In this vividly rendered book, Emily A. Owens wrestles with the question of why white men paid notoriously high prices to gain sexual access to the bodies of enslaved women to whom they already had legal and social access.

Owens centers the survival strategies and intellectual labor of Black women enslaved in New Orleans to unravel the culture of violence they endured, in which slaveholders obscured "the presence of force" with arrangements that included gifts and money. Owens's storytelling highlights that the classic formulation of rape law that requires "the presence of force" and "the absence of consent" to denote a crime was in fact a key legal fixture that packaged predation as pleasure and produced, rather than prevented, violence against Black women. Owens dramatically reorients our understanding of enslaved women's lives as well as of the nature of violence in the entire venture of racial slavery in the U.S. South. Unsettling the idea that consent is necessarily incompatible with structural and interpersonal violence, this history shows that when sex is understood as a transaction, women are imagined as responsible for their own violation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 6, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469670522

Emily A. Owens

Emily A. Owens is David and Michelle Ebersman Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.

Book preview

Cover: Consent in the Presence of Force, Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans by Emily A. Owens

Consent in the Presence of Force

Consent in the Presence of Force

Sexual Violence and Black Women’s Survival in Antebellum New Orleans

Emily A. Owens

The University of North Carolina Press    CHAPEL HILL

© 2023 Emily A. Owens

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Owens, Emily A., author.

Title: Consent in the presence of force : sexual violence and Black women’s survival in antebellum New Orleans / Emily A. Owens.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press,

[2023]

| Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022033431 | ISBN 9781469670515 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469672137 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469670522 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Women slaves—Abuse of—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—19th century. | Women slaves—Sexual behavior—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—19th century. | Women slaves—Louisiana—New Orleans—Social conditions—19th century. | African American women—Abuse of—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—19th century. | African American women—Sexual behavior—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—19th century. | African American women—Louisiana—New Orleans—Social conditions—19th century. | Sexual abuse victims—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—19th century. | Rape—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—19th century. | Sex workers—Louisiana—New Orleans—History—19th century. Classification: LCC E445.L8 O94 2023 | DDC 306.3/620820976335—dc23/eng/20220727

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022033431

Cover illustration: Detail from John Melish, Map of New Orleans and Adjacent Country (1815). Courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.

Chapter 3 was published previously in a different form as Promises: Sexual Labor in the Space between Slavery and Freedom, Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 58, no. 2 (2017): 179–216.

for my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

On Lies (or, after Archival Failure)

Introduction

Eliza’s Last Child

CHAPTER ONE

Ordinary Violence

CHAPTER TWO

Any White Woman or Girl

CHAPTER THREE

Contracts

CHAPTER FOUR

Of Mistresses and Concubines

Ann Maria Barclay’s Critique of Marriage

CHAPTER FIVE

Seeing New Orleans Again

Afterword

Believe Women

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

I.1A   "Seperation

[

sic

]

of Eliza and Her Last Child"    12

I.1B   Collection box of Rhode Island State Anti-Slavery Society    12

I.2     The ‘Peculiar’ Institution    13

1.1    Burning of Le Cap    33

1.2A  Lake Borgne    34

1.2B  Lake Pontchartrain    34

1.3    Delphine’s family tree    41

1.4    Delphine’s bill of sale    45

1.5    Louisa Picquet    47

2.1    Minute book, Orleans Parish First District Court    57

5.1    Philina advertisement    129

5.2    Map of Carrollton, annotated    135

MAPS

I.1     The Antebellum Atlantic    10

1.1    Delphine’s journey into New Orleans    28

3.1    Carmélite’s New Orleans    84

5.1    Alexina’s New Orleans    120

Acknowledgments

Most people who know me know that I am a gardener. I think of this book a bit the way I think of my garden, full of many people’s contributions sown alongside one another and tended together to become something new. Walking through the little garden that surrounds my home you’ll find transplants of Naoko’s raspberries, Cherrie’s pink mums, Matt’s rudbeckia, my mom’s bleeding heart, settled together amid the good ideas, advice, inspiration, and literal seeds that I have gathered from friends, teachers, family members, and people I simply admire from afar. Like my garden, this book has only come into being because of lots of time and lots of hard work, and, like my garden, this book is made more beautiful and complex because of the contributions of others.

I give thanks, first, to my teachers: Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Robin Bernstein, Vincent Brown, and Walter Johnson. You shaped my thinking so fundamentally that I hear your advice tumble out of my mouth when I speak to my own students, and I suspect (and hope) you will see your imprints on every page of this book. Your example of scholarly craft and moral fortitude guided me through graduate school and continues to steady me in this profession. To Evelyn, especially, I thank you for maintaining the highest of expectations while also teaching me that life, and living, precedes and enriches work.

I am grateful to have begun this project in the company of smart, ambitious, creative, and kind fellow graduate students. I learned from Rhae Lynn Barnes, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Lizzy Cooper Davis, Sandy Placido, Ben Weber, and Tsione Wolde-Michael. I give special thanks to my wonderful cohort-mates Ernest Julius Mitchell, Erin Mosely, Giovanna Micconi, and Carolyn Roberts for the dinners that renewed my spirit through those many years. In those years I learned also in the company of graduate students in the broader Boston area, and postdocs and faculty who passed through Harvard while I was there, including C. Riley Snorton, who taught me to love theoretical detail; Jayna Brown, who taught me to dream in the language of a book while hammering out a dissertation; Marisa Fuentes, who was the first person to tell me this project was doable; and the late S. J. Brooks, who built me a bicycle with a basket that could hold my books. I had the great good fortune to have been scooped up by the African American Intellectual History Society in its early days, and so I give thanks to Chris Cameron, Keisha Blain, Brandon Byrd, Greg Childs, and Ashley Farmer for giving me the language to call this project what it is.

I came to Brown a little perplexed to have landed in a history department, and am grateful to my colleagues for nurturing my confidence as an historian. I am also thankful to my colleagues in History for teaching me to prize departmental and university citizenship, for their optimism and persistence in trying to work together, and especially for, during a period when I was severely ill, making sure my family and I had dinner on the doorstep and fresh flowers on the table week after week, month after month. I am indebted to the colleagues who read drafts, offered archival leads, and workshopped pages with me at various stages of this writing, including Tony Bogues, Elena Shih, Maiyah Gamble-Rivers, and the community at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice; Tricia Rose, Stephanie Larrieux, and the community at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America; Bonnie Honig and Tricia Rose and the amazing feminists who read together in samizdat at the Pembroke Center; Amanda Anderson, Tim Bewes, Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Vazira Zamindar, Ariella Azoulay, Keisha-Khan Perry, Patricia Ybarra, and Jasmine Johnson at the Cogut Center for the Humanities and Political Concepts seminar; Mike Vorenberg, Rebecca Nedostup, Faiz Ahmed, and the community of the Brown Legal History Workshop; and my colleagues who read, and read again, and encouraged, and checked my facts, and pushed my thinking, and took me out for pizza: Caroline Castiglione, Bathsheba Demuth, Lin Fisher, Françoise Hamlin, Benjamin Hein, Juliet Hooker, Matt Guterl, Nancy Jacobs, Jennifer Johnson, Tara Nummendal, Ethan Pollock, Seth Rockman, Amy Remensnyder, Daniel Rodriguez, Naoko Shibusawa, Tracy Steffes, and Mike Vorenberg. I am immensely grateful to Robert Self for shepherding me into the department, for offering wise and trustworthy advice, and for being a friend, a neighbor, and an all-around mensch.

In New Orleans, Mia Bagneris, Sarah Howard, Jeff Lockman and Mark Townsend, Becky Mwase, and Kaya Williams offered warm places to sleep and mapped the city for me in ways the archives could not, balancing my trips into the nineteenth century with bayou picnics and sojourns to the farmers’ market. While I did research at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Theresa Wallace and John Chou opened their home and their enormous hearts to me for a whole semester. And in those cities, the archivists and librarians at the Historic New Orleans Collection, the Louisiana Research Collection (LaRC) at Tulane University, the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans (UNO), the Notarial Archive of the Orleans Parish City Clerk’s office, the New Orleans Public Library (NOPL), and the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) showed me the way into this work. Krystal Appiah at the LCP, James F. Lein at UNO, Sean Benjamin at LaRC, and Christina Bryant at the NOPL were incredibly helpful. Greg Osborne at the NOPL was enormously patient with me as I got with the program on the complex and changing history of the Orleans Parish courts, and his dedication was transformative for this project.

I have been privileged to do this research with the support of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, and the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. I am a proud alumna of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, and am grateful to this organization for bringing me into the academy and bringing me up in the academy, and for making sure people like me are not so alone when we get here. I was privileged again to land this book in the capable hands of Brandon Proia at the University of North Carolina Press, where he and his team offered encouragement and patience in equal measure and made the process of publication easier, more interesting, and more fun than I ever had imagined. Many thanks to Mishana Garschi, who has once again proven herself to be the GOAT of proofreading.

Black (and) feminist community has been at once the bedrock of my survival in the academy, a wellspring of intellectual curiosity and rigor, and a source of profound joy. I give thanks to Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman and Kevin Quashie for encouraging me to bring my heart to this work; to Lizzy Cooper Davis for showing me how to center the work and let institutions take shape around it, rather than the other way round; to Erica Armstrong Dunbar for mentoring me; to Crystal Feimster for naming the core of this project in the phrase cultural history of violence and intellectual history of survival (and to Naoko Shibusawa for transforming that insight into what has become this book’s subtitle); to Marisa Fuentes, who recognized the stakes of this research, and who demonstrated immense investment, commitment, and care to me over years of this writing; to Thavolia Glymph and Sarah Haley for your abiding belief in me and your example in the field; to Juliet Hooker for teaching me and teaching with me; to Martha Jones for your grace, your gentle push toward the end of this writing, and your reminder to go toward the light; to Andre Willis for uplifting me with your optimism and openness; to Keisha-Khan Perry for the realest real talk and for Thursday morning bike rides; to Jennifer Nash for charting the path and setting the pace in this field; to Samantha Pinto for her dazzling intellect, intellectual audacity, and biting humor; to Shoniqua Roach for cocreating a nourishing writing partnership; to Tricia Rose for pairing vision with dogged commitment, and for having my back at every single turn; and to Mairead Sullivan for bringing so much energy to our collaboration and for sparking my curiosity about what’s to come.

I offer enormous thanks to Lyle Cherneff, for whom the term research assistant has always felt insufficient. This book has been profoundly shaped by Lyle’s energy, curiosity, precision, and endurance as a researcher, and I return daily to the data he gathered as well as the conversations we shared in my garden during his last year at Brown.

A whole team of people are behind the maps and images in this book. I would have given up on making maps for this book had it not been for Lyle’s research and his resolve, and Lynn Carlson’s expertise; thank you, Lyle and Lynn, for pulling a rabbit out of a hat on that one. Thanks to Bertie Mandleblatt at the John Carter Brown Library for coaching me through using historical maps, and to Holly Snyder and Kim Nusco at the John Hay Library and the John Carter Brown Library for pointing me toward the real jewels in those collections. Thanks to my research assistant Nesya Nelkin for helping me stay organized in the last year of this writing, and thanks to Patrick Rashleigh and Connie Liu for producing a final set of graphics for this book.

Finally, I am humbled by the chance to thank my friends and family. Lizzy Cooper Davis is a beacon of joy and the smartest practitioner of anti-racist pedagogy that I know; thank you for making everything you touch not just better but also irresistibly cool, and for long lunches that never seem long enough. Kyle Frisina, I still can’t believe our luck in becoming neighbors after more than a decade of friendship; you taught me to savor the written word, and I am grateful for ongoing conversations about that which is theoretical, and that which is not. Lucia Hulsether, your sheer capacity as a scholar is humbling, but I count myself lucky because you also share with me your singular sense of humor, enveloping loving kindness, and soulful, delicious cooking. Becca Kolker, if you were not family anyway, you’d be the family I choose. For every drop by, every co-op dinner, every walk to the farmers’ market, I am grateful. To our little neighborhood crew—Kate McNamara, Jim Drain and Frida; Gabriel Rocha, Miranda Featherstone, Lola and Tomi; Dave Borton, Isa Restrepo, Willow and Sebastian; Amy Smith, Emily Smith and Calisia and Maggie—parenting alongside you beautiful, funny people kept me sane in the long season of pandemic. My friendship with Jennifer Johnson is steady and sustaining: thank you for your authenticity and for being a companion in the everyday trials and joys of being Black and an academic and a mama, for mama-nights and Pizza Fridays, and for bringing Craig and Gabriel into my life. Mandy Smith is family from scratch. It seems like every time I am about to give up or throw the whole book in the bin, you show up with a loaf of banana bread and a smile. Thank you for giving your heart so generously and for making snow days something very special indeed.

I was born into a family of sisters, and yet the gift of Jennifer Nash’s friendship has breathed new life into that word. I instinctively reach for my phone or type your name into an email when I have a new thought or question, so intertwined are our conversations with my sense of my own brain. You have shown me how to choose happiness and to make it, and I am grateful every day for the zillions of words, jokes, ideas, thoughts, and questions we have shared—and will share—since that fateful cup of tea in Café Gato Rojo.

To my siblings Shanda, Yoshi, Ohmead, Camille, Emmett, and Desmond, we are our own special configuration, and belonging to you has shaped me indelibly. I am grateful to Shanda for doting on me (and all of us) with pizza dates at Geraldine’s, to my three big sisters for helping to bring me up, to my little brothers for punctuating my adulthood with silliness and sweetness, and to Sarah for fitting yourself into our motley crew with humor and friendship (and bread!).

To my brother-in-law Michael and to his ever-lovely wife Anna, thank you for being cheerleaders of me as a writer and for committing to a close relationship despite a continent’s distance between us; I have cherished our visits with you and am grateful for how seamlessly you fit yourselves into our circus of a household when you arrive.

To my parents-in-law Karen Edwards and John Rieser, I am so grateful to you for embracing me unconditionally, for your validation and encouragement, and for being so explicit about carving out time and space for me to write. Time at the lake has come to be an organizing rubric for our family, and I look forward to many easy afternoons there for years and years and years to come.

To Camille, my pensive and brave sister, sometimes it feels like you see more colors than the rest of us—both more detail and more possibility. Thank you for alerting me to ways of seeing and ways of being that I would otherwise miss.

I thank my dad, Dennis Owens, for instilling in me a love of snow, and nice pottery, and simple gifts like boiling sap to make syrup. You are the only Black person I know who loves New England as much as I do, and I will never tire of skipping stones with you at the Quabbin.

It is a fool’s errand to try to sum up the gifts my mother, Cindy Owens, has given me on the way to this writing. But I’ll try. Mama, thank you for teaching me to revere books as near-sacred objects, for believing in me and telling me so, for taking care of my baby so I could write, and for the steady and steadying reminder to remember who you are.

I dedicate this book to my parents: I am so proud to belong to each of you.

To my son Jonah, when you were born I thought that you were not just the best baby who ever lived, but simply the only baby, the world’s baby, the one we had all been waiting for. Thank you for inviting me to learn anew the meanings of fearlessness, determination, wonder, and enthusiasm, and for making me laugh every single day. To my daughter Hazel, you helped me finish this book because your arrival provided an unequivocal deadline, but much more importantly I am grateful to you for returning me the thousand daily miracles of brand new life and for offering your cheerful little chirping as a soundtrack to copyediting. To both my kids, your unabashed demands for sanctuary, care, and fun are an inspiration.

And finally, I give thanks to my beautiful, kind, and brilliant wife. Kate, always my first and my last reader, you give me the confidence to do, try, and be anything. You have created for me the beautiful, unchanging same that makes everything else seem possible. You are my love.

Consent in the Presence of Force

Preface

On Lies (or, after Archival Failure)

The general appearance of said girl Alexina was that of a white girl, with fair complexion inclined to be sallow, blue eyes, and light colored straight hair. She is now I supposed between fifteen and sixteen years old and was rather small in size, she had a scar on her forehead which was plain to be seen, she was noted for being an outrageous liar.

—Alexina Morrison v. James White, 1861¹

Alexina Morrison was born enslaved on Elijah Decrou’s plantation, at a juncture called Pass Cavallo in Texas. When she was around five years old, a nearby slave owner named Moses Morrison visited the Decrou plantation; he arranged to purchase the child in December of 1848, along with her mother, brothers, and sisters as slaves. Morrison carried the nine-year-old child—who by then was recognizable as very fair for a mulatto, with yellow flaxen hair and light blue eyes—to Little Rock, Arkansas, probably in 1852. There, he left her with his nephew, Benjamin, who subsequently sold her around 1855, at age twelve, to one James Anthony.²

---

ALEXINA MORRISON WAS RAISED on a peninsula across from the town of Matagorda, Texas, a slave-trading port on the Gulf of Mexico, just southwest of Galveston. She was originally owned by a stock raiser, who ferried cattle and horses across the bay inland toward San Antonio. She had come into the possession of Moses Morrison, a slave trader who lived on the peninsula.³ Benjamin Giles knew all of this, because he met the seven-year-old in 1849, on a visit to his uncle’s home. He met her enslaved mother, Jane, on the same visit, and learned that Alexina was the fourth of Jane’s five children. He also knew that she was expensive.⁴

Just months later, Alexina had been moved again: now she was learning to sew and keep house at a boarding house in Little Rock, Arkansas, Giles’s hometown. Scarcely a year later, in 1850, Alexina could be found one hundred miles south of Little Rock at Joshua Morrison’s house: Moses was back, trying to offer the girl to his niece, Ellen. But Joshua (Moses’s brother and Ellen’s father) was worried about keeping so white a negro about him. The meeting of the family’s men—two brothers and their nephew—concluded with Benjamin Giles, dutiful nephew that he was, taking the child back with him to Little Rock. Here things get a bit more confusing: Alexina remained in Little Rock but didn’t see Giles much after 1851; Giles fetched $500 from her sale to James Anthony in 1854, but then she was on the road again with James Halliburton, a doctor who ferried her to New Orleans, in 1857.⁵

---

ALEXINA MORRISON WAS RENAMED JANE when she was about seven, because it troubled her new owner, James Anthony, to enunciate Alexina. She preferred it anyway.⁶ Anthony had purchased her under admittedly shady circumstances in 1850, in Little Rock, from a man who had connections out west.⁷ Jane spent the early 1850s living on James Anthony’s farm, just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas.

The girl had been born in Texas. As a child, her mother struck her with a stone and left a permanent scar on her forehead. Also in those early days, her older brother had run away from their first owner, Moses Morrison. The girl had a few older siblings, actually, and they were all still back in Texas with her mother.⁸

Jane was about twelve when her old owner, Moses Morrison, arrived in Little Rock and threatened to sue James Anthony. The year was 1855. Anthony didn’t know much about this fellow, or about the circumstances, whether sale loan or gift, under which Morrison had lost possession of the girl. Within a year, Anthony rid himself of any legal problem that could lurk in Jane’s possessed body: he sold her at a significant profit to a doctor bound for New Orleans in 1856.⁹

---

ANDRE HUTT WAS INTERESTED in buying a negro girl around 1854, and his neighbor James Anthony thought he might have a good one for him. Anthony brought his girl Jane by Hutt’s Little Rock store, and together the three of them traveled to his home. But neither Hutt nor his wife were pleased with the girl, even as Jane "tried to persuade

[his]

wife to buy her."¹⁰ Jane was anxious, sickly, and clinging to the possibility of a new owner. Later, Hutt saw the girl—but strangely now she was called Alexina—again: he visited her when she was in the sheriff’s custody at the courthouse in Jefferson County, Louisiana, in 1858.¹¹

---

DR. JAMES HALLIBURTON got rid of the girl he had purchased in Arkansas in 1856 quite quickly. He brought Jane Morrison to New Orleans in December, and by the first week of January he had dispatched with her. He sold Jane, a slave girl of yellow complexion … of light hair and light eyes, in the slave yard of W. Martin and W. J. Pierce on January 6, 1857. James White, a longtime slave trader who had recently sold that very slave yard to Martin and Pierce, purchased the girl for $750.¹²

---

ALEXINA MORRISON WAS APPARENTLY BORN in both Pass Cavallo and Matagorda; she was gifted, loaned, and sold to Benjamin Giles by his uncle; she was transferred to James Anthony in 1850, 1854, and 1855; and she arrived in Little Rock in 1850 and 1852. The circumstances of her movements were frequently described as notorious and the man who purchased her, brought her to New Orleans, and sold her within the span of a single season could never be located to provide testimony. The men who had owned, borrowed, lived with, and known¹³ Alexina present so many contradictions in their accounting of her life as to call attention to the lies they must have been telling.

Thus the way that Alexina Morrison’s history arrives in court documents may be better described as a richly narrated fiction than as a fragment. Like the many fractured forms of the girl that Saidiya Hartman has sought out and with which Marisa Fuentes has painstakingly dwelled, the violence that was foundational to Morrison’s existence has also exterminated any possibility of recovery or redress.¹⁴ There are, as Fuentes writes, no whole figures of Black women to be found in the archives of slavery.¹⁵ Yet in Morrison’s case, as in the cases of the other women in this book, her life is not so much absent—stripped bare of all that was meaningful,¹⁶ or retained over time in literally singular, fragmentary ephemera—as abundantly overwritten. While a self-determined voice of Alexina Morrison is hardly accessible in the 194 pages of trial records bearing her name, her likeness is conjured among an excess of fictions.

The record of Morrison’s case, drawn from the Louisiana State Supreme Court collection held at the University of New Orleans, is exemplary of the records that are the bedrock of this book. Like Walter Johnson, who opened this collection in his seminal Soul by Soul, I generally read the docket records as if they contain only lies.¹⁷ The men who testified in this case routinely and blatantly contradicted one another, so I presume that all of them were lying. If Hartman’s call to jeopardize the status of the event puts pressure on historians’ basic project—unearthing data with which to construct a coherent narrative of past events—the claim also calls attention to the lies that are always already present in slaveholding vernacular, from the delusional parlance of slaveholders to the self-interested manipulations that tidied up property agreements and the like. These documents require, as W. E. B. DuBois argued in his prescient revision of the history of Reconstruction, frankly facing the facts of universal lying.¹⁸

The lies of white men preempt the historian’s need to jeopardize the status of the event by revealing their own flexible relationship with description of events. In this case, witnesses’ compiled timeline of events, meant to assert a chain of custody of Morrison’s person to ensure her continued enslavement, amounts to a pile of contradictions. Nonetheless, as Johnson writes, Lies, especially sworn lies given in support of high-stakes legal action, must be believable in order to be worth telling.¹⁹ Those lies—and the extent of their content that was unremarkable in its own time—reveal the contours of their common sense, which in turn gave cultural, economic, and legal shape to their world. It was from within that world that Alexina strategized her own survival, and it is from that place—at the intersection of slaveholding violence and enslaved women’s capacity to live on, anyway—that this book begins.

Given the simultaneously incomplete and excessive nature of these records, the pages that follow here are necessarily preceded by a question: How does one tell this story? How do we transform fiction into history? If history is a form of creative writing, but has an agenda rooted in empiricism, how do we begin to write the history of Alexina Morrison knowing that the evidence available is not just partial, but actually made-up? Is it possible to uncover a factual narrative among a robust set of counterfactuals, a slew of fictions?

This last question emerges from a set of concerns that Black feminist historians have been asking for decades under the aegis of silence. Silence was the metaphor that the first generation of scholars of African American women’s history mobilized because, as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham wrote in 1989, the sound of silence … resonates through much of the scholarship on Afro-Americans and women.²⁰ The silences announced themselves loudly to the founders of the field—Higginbotham, Elsa Barkley Brown, Darlene Clark Hine, Deborah Gray White, Paula Giddings, Sharon Harley, Tera Hunter, Nell Painter, and others who wrote the texts that have become the canon of Black women’s history. These scholars’ persistent use of silence as a metaphor for Black women’s place in the past underscored the lessons of social history—that it was critical to read historical documents in oblique ways—while at the same time highlighting that, in the case of African American women, that historical record would not be particularly forgiving. In particular, Higginbotham’s and especially Hine’s (Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West, also published in 1989) attention to silences that inhered at the level of Black women’s sexuality meant that silence as a problem, and breaking silence as a practice, would adhere particularly strongly to studies of Black female sexuality.²¹ Within and beyond the field of history, Black feminist scholars produced work that theorized sexual silence (along with invisibility and hypervisibility); that historicized Black women’s intentional and strategic silences about their sexual lives; and that broke silences about Black women’s nonnormative sexualities, especially with respect to sexual violence in slavery and sexual labor after slavery.²²

If silences—finding them and breaking them—was the central project of African American women’s history for the duration of the twentieth century, Hartman reanimated and crucially shifted this conversation in 2008 with her Venus in Two Acts. This essay was catalytic because it hitched an ethical problem to the already legible raison d’être of African American women’s history, asking, under what circumstances might the project of historical study do harm? In other words, she took the field’s preoccupation with silences, which had been shaped by a second-wave feminist presumption that breaking silences is a positive good, and raised a new question: Should we break silences? If, Hartman argues, enslaved women arrive in the