I have been accused of allowing white supremacist notions of race to dictate how I see myself. I have been told that in this day and age, over fifty years since antimiscegenation laws were deemed unconstitutional, I have the freedom to claim the whiteness of my mother.
Every time I was told that my hair was too kinky, it was my Black hair that was disparaged. Every time I was told that my nose was too wide, it was my Black nose that was rejected. Every time I was called a monkey or a gorilla, it was my Blackness that was hated. Every time I was called loud or angry, it was my Blackness that was feared.
And it is my Blackness that has fought back. My Blackness that has survived. The vast majority of Black Americans, often through the rape of Black ancestors by white enslavers, have the ancestry of white Americans running through them. But when the privileges of whiteness were kept from us, it was our Blackness that persevered. I am so very proud of that.
I love my mother. I see her face when I look in the mirror. But whiteness, as a political and social construct, exists because of the fear of my very existence, and it functions to this day to aid in my oppression and exploitation.
Until the systemic functions of whiteness that began with the whipping of Hugh Davis are dismantled, I cannot claim whiteness. And as long as my survival is tied to my ability to resist the oppression of white supremacy, I’ll be damned if I’ll let whiteness claim me.
1634–1639
TOBACCO
DaMaris B. Hill
Before he became a planter, Rolfe told Go-Go that stalagmite was a diamond. He had never seen any actual diamonds but couldn’t admit it.
Diamonds in the colonies were travelers’ lies, like the streets of gold and the mercy of missionaries. The only real thing in his life was an African girl he plucked from Bermuda, the one twin who wasn’t traded for Spanish tobacco seeds on the high seas off the legal coast of what used to be called Virginola. That girl was carried into Jamestown and appeared as a speck of wonder to the eye of a young Indian princess called Pocahontas. This girl’s skin with its brush of indigo was a lush wonder among the pale settlers the Indian princess witnessed.
And now Rolfe loved her. He showed her how to find the veins in each tobacco leaf, showed her how to crawl between the rows and look for parasites. Ever since the enslaved African and tobacco appeared in Jamestown, English colonists found ways to trade for food and plant tobacco after the last frost. Pocahontas was young and sure that this little girl was a Jogahoh, a trickster who knew the secrets of the earth. And that became the name they started calling her, Go-Go. What power did Rolfe have to make the magic people do his bidding?
No one was left to tell the record keepers about Go-Go’s sister, the one Rolfe traded for the sweetest tobacco seeds a Spanish conquistador could smuggle. He quickly pacified his anxiety about leaving the other twin with the conquistadors sailing back to Portugal, because they were on their way to their wives. Why worry about the girl? Where was the room for worry in the New World? The anxiety about a lost twin? Where was space to remember any of them?
It is August 1635. Rolfe is long dead, and the indigo girl Go-Go is an old woman who has made generations in the marshes of Virginia, while the English cycle in on sponsored passage to the Americas, dreaming about a better life than London had to offer. In the squalor of London, they were nursed at poverty’s breasts, especially the women. Even with the odds of three men to one woman, none of them found fortune on the passage. No man had a penny to pay. After a few weeks at sea and as the rations got low, few of the men honored English law or cared how some hoity man lost his head for raping his rich wife, as was the punishment. The men were tired of taking turns on one another and began to reason about raping women. This was not the only abuse these English women would come to know. Their bodies would come to know how a snake is wicked only if it is under your foot and how a leech can become an anchor. They came to know that either could drown you in a few inches of water and that the lush leaves of tobacco did not provide shade. They came to know the work without boundaries.
Before and after 1636, ships come from Angola and the Caribbean carrying Africans who add life to the scourge of death in the colonies. When they arrive, the Indians and indentured whites who speak to them tell them about the ten colonists who became two in the first year. Then they tell them about the packs of English who creep up like wild crops in the forest and always with a woman running away. Then they say that everything was new when the Rolfe showed up with seeds and the indigo girl, the Jogahoh, who grew up without sickness and became the woman Go-Go. Then they count her children and grandchildren aloud. They explain how to know her. Her hands and skin stained blue with other-world Godliness. The Indians tell the Africans that Go-Go was the one who made this tobacco spring from the earth. The Indians tell the Africans that the English have proven to be liars since the first lot, and that the latest lie is: “Only the African can keep the Spanish tobacco alive.” The lie is that the Africans are the only ones who can cut tobacco at the base and survive the stalk.
The truth is that King Charles can’t get enough of taxes. By 1639, he divides Virginia into shires, and everyone needs to count every body to calculate the assessment owed to the king for his armies. It is in this year that Go-Go calls out her sister’s sacred name as she watches her pale-eyed granddaughter sold across the river to cover the tax on tobacco.
1639–1644
BLACK WOMEN’S LABOR
Brenda E. Stevenson
Enslavement in the Americas wrought multiple, complex horrors in the lives, families, communities, and cultures of the millions of Africans who fell captive to the inhumane system of the Atlantic slave trade. Those who arrived in British North America were hardly immune to these brutalities. Not the least of these abuses was the persistent assault on gendered identities as part of the effort to erase captives’ humanity, self-worth, and traditional roles within their Indigenous cultures and communities.
One of the first attempts to codify these practices took place in March 1643, when Virginia’s General Assembly passed the following measure:
Be it also enacted and confirmed that there be four pounds of tobacco…and a bushel of corn…paid to the Ministers within the several parishes of the colony for all titheable persons, that is to say as well for all youths of sixteen years of age as [upwards?] and also for all negro women at the age of sixteen year.
These few words designated a Black female of sixteen years or older as a “tithable”—meaning that taxes paid to the church would be assessed on these women. Neither white nor Indigenous women had that distinction. In that way, Virginia’s earliest leaders legally equated African women with men, erasing these women’s public claim to feminine equality with other women. These elite white men did so through British colonial society’s most important legal institution, their elected governance body. Their justification was that taxing Black women was a necessary part of the financial support structure for the colony’s most important sociocultural establishment, the Church of England.