Sexual violence significantly impacted the lives of enslaved men and women, a painful reality historians have only recently begun to unravel and understand. Historical studies of the sexual exploitation of enslaved women by white men, the economy of forced breeding in areas of the Upper South and along the Atlantic seaboard, and the sexual labor performed by fair-skinned “mulatto” and “quadroon” women in New Orleans, Charleston, and other Atlantic entrêpots published in the last several decades have brought to light the tragic and sexually violent dimensions of racial slavery in America. The sexual victimization of enslaved men, however, has gone unnoticed in the historiography of American slavery. But thanks to new scholarship by Howard University Professor of History Thomas A. Foster, this no longer remains so.
Building on the preliminary findings of his 2011 article “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men Under American Slavery,” Thomas A. Foster’s new book published by the University of Georgia Press’s “Gender and Slavery” series Rethinking Rufus: Sexual Violations of Enslaved Men (2019) pushes past depictions of slavery as a dehumanizing institution which thrived based on its ability to physically brutalize the bodies of enslaved men and sexually violate the bodies of enslaved women. Instead, Foster’s beautifully-crafted and deeply-researched book proves that the two were not mutually exclusive. Flipping the script, Foster asserts in the introduction of Rethinking Rufus that racial slavery subjected enslaved men to a range of sexual violations, most of which have elided scholarly attention. Opening the book and each chapter with the well-known story of Rose Maddox, a formerly enslaved woman from Texas who was forced to have sex with an enslaved man named Rufus, Foster reframes the story from Rufus’ perspective in an effort to reconstruct the sexual victimization of enslaved men.
The narrative Thomas Foster tells in Rethinking Rufus is both groundbreaking and heartbreaking. Foster’s decisive analytical reading of archival sources with a gaze sensitive to the perspective of enslaved men, their bodies and masculinity, and their subjection to a range of sexually violent acts beyond simply rape demonstrate his expertise as a historian of early American sexuality. In addition to considering the effects of forced breeding on enslaved men’s psyches and their status in the broader enslaved community, Foster’s imaginative examination of the pornographic depictions of enslaved men in abolitionist literature in the opening chapters of the book are profound. As he shows, these images accentuated the mutilated genitalia, bare buttocks, and musculature of abused black male bodies. And in the antebellum slave markets of the American South, slave traders, buyers, and other spectators saw erotic desire and economic promise embodied in the nude figures of enslaved men, bodies smeared in oil and forced to masquerade in sexually-suggestive fashions. Thus, the eroticized objectification of bondmen’s bodies Foster argues operated as a lesser known conduit for their sexual exploitation.
In later chapters of the book, Foster explores the sexual victimization of enslaved men at the hands of white mistresses and masters. Although no archival evidence exists to suggest the presence of a formalized sexual economy for light-skinned enslaved men similar to those in New Orleans involving “fancy girls” and quadroons, Foster’s use of the testimonies gathered by the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission (AFIC) reveals the eroticization of light-skinned “mulatto” men in several cities across the antebellum south. Compelled to engage in non-consensual sexual intercourse with white women, men, and other slaves, Foster’s study of the sexual victimization of enslaved men reveals new features of what legal scholar Adrienne Davis has called the “sexual economy of American slavery.” Their physical labor notwithstanding, the exploitation of enslaved men’s sexuality rested at the heart of chattel slavery in the Americas.
Four hundred years ago, the arrival of twenty enslaved African laborers in Jamestown, Virginia, signaled the beginning of an over two-century long enterprise in human bondage in America. Recent initiatives by the New York Times Magazine to study the legacies of racial slavery in America culminated with the ongoing #1619Project. As we commemorate the fourth centennial of racial slavery in the United States, scholars and the public alike must remember to be mindful of slavery’s intimate scars. Pausing for a moment to consider the unseen as well the unheard voices of enslaved men, Thomas A. Foster’s expertly researched and crisply written new book Rethinking Rufus lays bear the untold history of the sexual violence endured by enslaved men. Foster’s Rethinking Rufus is a must read for all history buffs, educators, students, and activists who share a commitment to an unbiased and non-celebratory narrative of American history.
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