Chapter One
Soiled
How come you motherfuckers don't bring no white bitches when you come up here? -- Richard Pryor, to a white man coming to a black whorehouse
Background
Throughout American history, the white male and the black female have had an open sexual relationship. Not consensual, by any means. It was born out of rape, humility, and control. During slavery, whites "introduced the house slaves to white ways, minimal education and non-consensual sexual relations." It has long been held that even the father of the United States, George Washington, had sexual intercourse with his female slaves and it was this behavior that may have resulted in his death. He reportedly caught pneumonia because of his frequent visits to the slave quarters, which were less fit for human habitation.
The most perverse celebration of these associations was Thomas Jefferson's relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings. Many have celebrated it as a romance of the forbidden fruit, but, as Randall Robinson asserts, "Jefferson was a slave holder, a racist, and -- if one accepts that consent cannot be given if it cannot be denied -- a rapist." Black people at this time had no rights and were considered the property of white men to do with as they pleased. Robert Newsome, a sixty-year-old slaver, "needed more than a hostess and a manager of household affairs; he required a sexual partner. Newsome seems to have deliberately chosen to purchase a young slave girl to fulfill this role...." It is certain that "from the moment he purchased Celia, Newsome regarded her as both his property and concubine." And "[o]n his return to Callaway County, Newsome raped Celia, and by that act, once established and defined the nature of the relationship between the master and his newly acquired slave." She was just fourteen years old and that was probably her first sexual experience. During this time, as well as much later on, "[f]ew black women reached the age of sixteen without having been molested by a white male."
Without any rights, legal recourse, or protection from local, state, or federal authorities, a black woman could make no decision concerning anything that affected her life. There were no battered women's shelters, NOW movement, rape crisis center, NAACP, Al Sharpton, or any support sympathetic to her discomforts. She was completely incapable of rejecting her master's wishes. Her choices were to do or die.
This was the beginning of the soiling of the black woman in America. It was especially devastating when seen through the spectacles of black men. The experience painted an unflattering picture of her that has remained in the mental albums of black men. She was reduced to a sexual brood mare to increase the slave population, which helped to create the enormous white wealth that further empowered the colonizers, as well as satisfy the slaver's salacious sickness, degenerating her to an ejaculatory dumping ground for the grotesque pleasures forced on the conquered. There is no denying "that the white man has had the chief hand in undermining the morals of the Negro women. He has been living in concubinage with them for over three hundred years!" In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois said, "The red stain of bastardy, which two centuries of systemic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon [this] race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from white adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home." One slave recalled:
My marster owned three plantations and three hundred slaves. He started out wid two 'oman slaves and raised three hundred slaves. One wuz called "Short Peggy" and the udder wuz called "Long Peggy." Long Peggy had twenty-five chilluns. Long Peggy, a black 'oman, wuz boss ob de plantation. Marster freed her atter she had twenty-five chilluns. Just think o' dat -- raisin' three hundred slaves wid two 'omans.
Harriet Jacobs in her slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, recounted:
For years my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images and to destroy the pure images inculcated by my grandmother....
He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I turned from him with disgust and hatred. But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him -- where I saw a man forty years my senior daily violating the most sacred commandments of nature.
Dirt floors, barns, cotton fields, slave houses, back porches, bathrooms, outhouses, and any place one could imagine served as the theater for the slave master's pornographic exploits. Not only was the black woman brought down, but she was now dirty, used, abused, passed around, and been around.
The Contrived Goddess
On the other side, the white woman was held up as the pure, Christian, ideal example of womanhood and, more important, she was completely off limits to the black man. If the eyes of a black man were to land on a white woman, it could mean death. Black men were dehumanized through whipping, hanging, castration, decapitation, burning, drowning, dismembering, and various other forms of atrocious human behavior, simply to right the wrongs of a casual glance, a practice that is still in vogue in modern American society. In 1989, Yusuf Hawkins was shot to death in Brooklyn because he was mistaken for someone seeing a white girl. And in 2003, an eighteen-year-old Georgia high-school football player was sentenced to ten years in prison for having sex with a white girl who was two months from her seventeenth birthday. It was consensual, but when her father found out, he forced her to say it was rape.
Historically, "[c]hallenging the word of a white woman just wasn't done."
Consequently, the white woman eventually developed a cry of omnipotence. All that was needed was an accusation against a black person to trigger the wrath of her male protectors. Even if she cried wolf, there was guaranteed punishment for the accused. Charles Stuart tried this tactic after murdering his wife in Massachusetts and blaming it on a black man. He wanted insurance money to open a restaurant -- she was eight months pregnant when he shot her in the head. As a result, many black men were harassed and detained, and one was arrested who "confessed" to a crime Mr. Stuart was later found to have committed. Susan Smith used it to try to scatter the scent of suspicion after she drowned her children and blamed a black man for kidnapping them.
In the summer of 2002, Bryant Gumbel's son, Bradley, was arrested and held for twenty-four hours because a white woman said he looked like the man who attacked her. Not long after, the entire state of Florida was on lockdown as the world watched three Muslim men detained for seventeen hours because some white woman said she heard them talking suspiciously.
And the story of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till -- who was snatched from his bed in the middle of the night, tortured for days, and tossed into the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi with a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan around his neck and a shotgun hole in his head for whistling at a white store clerk in the 1950s -- still remains a shameful part of American history.
"Dare I ask how does it feel to have a horrible crime committed in your name?" wrote Nikki Giovanni.
While the black woman could be violated at will, the white woman's comfort was protected with the ultimate price. In this case, the death penalty was not law but habit as the casual killing of black men became sport. This environment helped to greatly increase any interest the black man may have had in the white woman. If the black man had no innate interest in the white woman, he certainly would have developed some just out of curiosity. Anyone would be intrigued by what was being protected. A Ph.D. in human anatomy and genetics would find interest in a white woman if he was denied access to her. Just being denied the ability to even look at someone would create an interest, and over the years an obsession would develop -- a phenomenon that is still evident in many black men.
Sexual Distance
The more the black woman was soiled, the more the white woman was deified. On many occasions, even looking at a movie poster with a white woman on it was criminal, as was brushing past her, looking her in the eye, or being in the same room alone with her. As the physical and social distance between the white woman and the black man increased, the psychosexual distance between the two decreased, developing a mutual interest. One could view this as a psychological rubber band. Left alone, the opposing sides of the rubber band are not drawn together, but pull them apart and the slightest give sends the two rushing toward each other.
Additionally, the white man's relationship with the black woman and his protection of white women created an appetite of vengeful lust within many black men, as well as a deep interest by the white woman. Interactions between white men and black women were in your face and very difficult to ignore. It was not subtle, or on the down low; it was vile, repugnant, evil, and unforgiving. The experience coined the most used word in America when describing someone or even something that is despised -- motherfucker.
There was absolutely no respect for the emotional existence of the black family. Entering slave quarters, the white man would walk past the black man and his children and defile any black female at will. That female could even be a child and often was. He would also warn the black man that the experience had better be good; and oftentimes the black male would pledge that it would be good, as if to provide the rapist a sexual guarantee. On the way out, the rapist would arrogantly acknowledge that it was good and r...
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
