Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner

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Figure 5. New Negroes Known to Have Been Purchased for Golden Grove Estate, 1765–94. Source: Compiled from Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765–1810,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99–121.

      The fact that young women did not dominate the number of captive Africans landing in Jamaica suggests that despite preferences planters expressed, the constraints of the slave trade ultimately determined the sex and age of cargo available to Jamaican planters.²⁹ Scholars debate the reasons for the sex and age ratios of Africans imported into the Americas. Some scholars argue that fewer females were available for the transatlantic trade because regional trades in Africa valued women as more important for agricultural production than men.³⁰ Others assert that both women and men were integral to West African agriculture and that other factors such as the type of crop produced, warfare, judicial processes, and strategies of enslavement were important determinants of the slave trade’s age and gendered composition and variation over time.³¹ Social and political conditions in Africa were also important factors that determined the availability of young women and girls for export into the Americas.³²

      Market demands also influenced the sex and age of Africans transported into the American markets. Slave traders would buy Africans from dealers not just according to what the market offered but also according to what they calculated would yield greatest profits. From the earliest years of the slave trade, West Indian buyers established their sex preferences. Moreover, when traders did not deliver according to market demands in the Americas, their buyers chastised them and paid very little for the undesired cargo. John Barnes, governor of the slave trading fort of Senegal, reported that merchants rejected African captives for several reasons.³³ Chief among these was that the expected resale value of Africans did not exceed their original purchase price.³⁴ Merchants refused to trade cargo who they calculated “were not worth their freight” for transportation to the Americas.³⁵

      While Caribbean planters made clear their preferences for age and sex they were unwilling to buy slaves who were ailing, maimed, or otherwise disabled, even if such consignment suited the other stated desires of buyers. The overriding concern among Jamaican buyers was obtaining healthy, able-bodied workers who would live long and work hard enough to return their investment. Planters readily purchased healthy women despite stated preferences for men. Buyer and seller interests in this regard aligned. Slave traders aimed to depart the African coast rapidly because delayed departures (even if to secure particular cargo) increased demands on food and supplies and greater likelihood of illness, death, and revolts, which meant that the captives who set sail for the Americas were those most quickly acquired and in the best of health.³⁶

      Whether one argues that supply conditions in Africa or profit calculations more significantly affected the disparities in sex and age, it is abundantly clear that planter preferences and their purchases were at odds. After 1788, Jamaican planters had a clear preference for young females. However, import records for Jamaica reveal continued male preponderance. These disparities tell us that the fulfilment of abolitionist-inspired pronatal plans did not depend only on planters working out reforms according to property needs or the capabilities of captive women and girls. The supply constraints and unpredictability of the slave trade also imperiled pronatalism. Reform-minded planters, therefore, needed to align their practices to cope with the limitations of the slave trade, placing them further at odds with the proposed policies of abolitionists.

      While quantitative analyses are important for calculating trends and the magnitude of the slave trade, they sometimes obscure more than they reveal.³⁷ We know that males dominated Jamaica’s slave imports, but it is not clear what the sex and age ratios were for the period 1798 to 1806, during the height of abolitionist activism.³⁸ This was the most crucial period when planters were unusually attentive to the sex and age of captive Africans. Beyond the unavailability of data, a purely quantitative approach also does not tell us how estate proprietors, attorneys, and overseers solved their quotidian problems of balancing production and reproduction, nor does it reveal the everyday experiences of enslaved men, women, boys, and girls.

      Although planters aimed to buy young women below age twenty-five, identifying the age of captive Africans was not an exact science. Buyers and sellers used various idiosyncratic means of telling the age of their cargoes, including the presence or absence of gray hair as well as teeth and skin condition. Testifying to a parliamentary special committee formed to investigate the slave trade, former trader John Fountain revealed that buyers inspected African captives to ensure they had no “defects” that would adversely affect their abilities to labor. “Stamping their foot boldly on the ground and stretching out their arms” would ensure commodities’ soundness. African dealers, Fountain testified, “are very cunning and commit various frauds in their trade with the Europeans.”³⁹ Thus, he reported, buyers spared neither dignity nor humanity as they closely examined the “privies of men and women” to ensure they were “sound in wind and limb [and] to judge their age.”⁴⁰

      When it came to identifying the relative age of young women, or more precisely, those within their childbearing years, buyers worked out peculiar methods of determination.⁴¹ Women’s breasts betrayed their childbearing history. Buyers estimated that women with sagging breasts had already given birth or could no longer bear children. One account identified such women as those whose breasts were visible from a distance “hang[ing] down below their Navels.” “Young Negro Virgins,” however, were differentiated by the firmness of their breasts. As planter-historian Richard Ligon explained it, such young women had breasts that were “round, firm, and beautifully shaped.”⁴² Buyers and sellers in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century thus singled out the breasts of captives to estimate the age and reproductive potential of women in addition to inscribing racial meanings as their seventeenth-century predecessors had done. Captive women’s breasts were continuously imbued with meanings that underpinned the economic and racial edifice of slavery.

      Yet the shift in language away from sagging breasts primarily meaning African savagery to sagging breasts as prime indicator of childbearing potential marks a crucial transformation in the process of enslavement. Before buying new Africans, plantation physician Dr. David Collins advised, “pains should be taken to discover whether they are really what they appear to be, and pains should be taken to discover whether they have any personal defects which impair their value, if they do not render them entirely unfit for your purpose.” Captive women and girls were poked, prodded, and fondled by traders and buyers to ensure they were of “good stature … without any long breasts hanging down.” They stood in lines, in pairs, “stark naked” with buyers variously “squeezing their joints & muscles, twisting their arms & legs, and examining teeth, eyes and chest, and pinching [their] breasts without mercy.”⁴³

      Auctioneers introduced captives to buyers by emphasizing body parts that bespoke their reproductive promise. This was true in not only the Caribbean but North America as well, where the increased value of the womb shaped the slave market. Attempting to solicit the interest of buyers, one New Orleans trader СКАЧАТЬ