"Not Today": Examining the Role of Violence in Asserting Humanity During Chattel Slavery

written by Dr. Robert L. Reece, PhD

Chloe was an enslaved woman and the mother of a child who would grow up to be Rev. London Ferebee. But she never got the opportunity to see him grow from a boy to a man as she was sold away from him while he was still young. But as a man Rev. Ferebee wrote proudly about the incident that led to his mother being sold.

Chloe worked in the kitchen. One morning Chloe and the plantation mistress argued in the kitchen over some trifle. White women were known to rule plantation homes with an iron fist, and many slaves, especially women and children, fell to their wrath, suffering beatings or worse. But not Chloe. She had her own reputation for being fiery and obstinate, a fact her son attributes to her “Indian blood.”

The mistress tried to hit her and missed. But Chloe issued a warning to the white woman: “If you strike me, it will be the dearest lick ever you struck,” leading the mistress to stand down. But that was only a temporary measure as she prepared to deploy the slave mistress’s strongest superpower: telling her husband.

The husband entered the kitchen with his pistol and whip. Chloe had returned to work, cleaning fish with a large butcher knife. He issued a challenge to her: “Chloe, if you don't let me whip you for saucing your mistress, I'll shoot you.” But Chloe remained unmoved. She opened her bosom and responded, “Shoot; that's the only way you can whip me.”

The situation escalated rapidly after that. He lashed out at Chloe with the whip. In what had to be inspiration for John Wick, she grabbed the whip midair and cut it in half with the knife she’d been using, leaving the man with only his pistol for protection. She charged him, and they grappled. Like Kurt Angle in his prime, Chloe came out on top, throwing her master to the ground and causing the gun the fire. She pinned him to the ground with one knee on his chest and one knee on his gun arm, which was soon to have no gun in it. She wrestled the gun from him and began to beat him across the head with it as he cried for help until some of his workers came to remove her.

Chloe was sold the very next day and never saw her son again, but the lessons she imparted to him through her resistance stuck with him. And I hope they can stick with us.

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I am writing this essay at a dangerous moment. The world is currently watching half a dozen active and pending genocides and vociferously debating the proper political responses from those suffering. “Turn the other cheek,” they say. “Violence begets more violence,” they say.

Indeed, I can already imagine the responses to this piece. I can see the tweets, the emails, the Facebook comments in my mind’s eyes. I can hear the critics, the chorus of white voices asking in unison “so you condone violence?!?!” As an answer, I want to start with the words of slave abolitionist Henry Clarke Wright:

"The slaves of George Washington had as good a right to cut their master’s throat as he had to throw his cannonball and bombshells from Dorchester Heights upon the British in Boston Harbor."

There is an inherent hypocrisy in asking, or even hoping, enslaved people to remain nonviolent while celebrating violent beginnings of empire such as the American Revolution. Violent resistance is a key part of American culture, from the American Revolution to “Stand Your Ground” laws, as A. Philip Randolph said in his 1919 essay “How to Stop Lynching”, “Anglo Saxon jurisprudence recognizes the law of self-defense.” This country adores violence when the right people hold the gun, a fact Frederick Douglass made clear in his famous “Fourth of July” speech. He reminded his audience that Americans “bare[d] [their] bosom to the storm of British artillery to throw off a threepenny tax on tea” yet found violence in service of black freedom untenable. And in a 2017 article, geographer Valentina Capurri laid the issue bare when she wrote “If we hope to find a place for justice in this word, we must…recognize that when the prize is freedom, anything goes.”

But from my reading of roughly 300 slave narratives and 2,200 life history interviews with formerly enslaved people for my book on the topic (currently contracted with Polity Press), enslaved people weren’t necessarily fighting for freedom when they raised their hands in defense against their masters. Often, they were fighting for pride.

My all-time favorite essay is a 1992 piece from critical race scholar Derrick Bell. In it he argues that resistance against a power greater than oneself cannot be measured in terms of simple wins and losses. Instead, he flips the idea of resistance on its head and reminds us that resistance can be its own reward, leading to “triumph” and “fulfillment” even if we lose by traditional metrics. He says that “the struggle for freedom is, at bottom, a manifestation of our humanity that survives and grows stronger through resistance to oppression, even if that oppression is never overcome.” For Bell, whether we “win” the fight for freedom is less important than the fight itself. Victory is in reminding our oppressors that even oppression comes at a cost, that while they may step on us, we have put shit covered nails in their boots.

The argument is reminiscent of the climactic scene in the 1996 blockbuster Independence Day, when the fictional President Thomas Whitmore stood in front of his motley crew of makeshift fighter pilots and declared “We will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight.” And this fight, according to Bell, “has meaning and should give us hope for the future.”

Black slaves embodied this spirit.

They had no idea when or if Emancipation would come, and for many in the Deep South fleeing north was simply untenable. So instead, they resolved to defend themselves when they could and let the chips fall where they may. As Africana philosopher Tommy Curry put it in a 2007 essay, “The decision to act violently is a calculated risk; it admits the unchanging reality of Black oppression and seeks to respond to that oppression in earnest.”

And respond they did.

Friday Jones was enslaved in Raleigh, North Carolina. Like many slave relationships he lived apart from his wife, who was enslaved on another plantation some distance away. Friday was a good enough worker that his owner allowed him to hire himself out, and the two men probably split the extra money. Friday used his share to dress his wife in the finest clothes, so fine, in fact, that the owner became jealous and commented that Friday dressed his wife better than the enslaver’s own wife. Friday responded, “Master, that is my money; I work for it. If I don’t give it to my wife and children, what am I to do with it?” But that was only the beginning.

One morning Friday returned after visiting his wife and was confronted by his owner, who asked why he had been gone so long. With a spirit of defiance fueled by affection for his wife Friday fired back, “Sir, I love my wife—you love yours; if you don’t want me to go see my wife, just send me as far away as you can, by land or water, for I am going at the risk of my life.” Friday’s boldness proved too much for the owner, who lunged at Friday, futilely trying to tie his hands and whip him. Friday refused to submit, fighting the owner blow for blow.

The owner’s wife screeched in the background, crying, bawling, begging, and pleading for Friday to simply allow her husband to whip him so they could settle this affair. Friday was not having it.

As she realized Friday was resolute in his desire to fight the owner, the wife sent for help from their neighbors, but Friday remained one step ahead. He managed to close himself in a room with the owner and wife and wrapped some heavy chains around his fist, preparing to “drop them—knock them down as they came in.” Fortunately for the white people trying to enter the room, they heeded the warnings from Friday and returned home. As for Friday’s owner, on the heels of the beating he received, he and his wife allowed the slave to return to work unharmed.

…

Chloe, Friday, and literally hundreds of others, looked around at their situation with clear eyes and brave hearts and decided they had no choice but to meet white brutality in kind. Famed psychotherapist Franz Fanon wrote and argued that such violence puts oppressed and oppressor on equal footing, at least on the stage of battle, and reminds the oppressed that they are just as valuable as those seeking to keep a boot on their neck. This sense of value is emboldening, empowering, and humanizing. He writes “If, in fact, my life is worth as much as the colonist’s, his look can no longer strike fear into me or nail me to the spot and his voice can no longer petrify me. I am no longer uneasy in his presence. In reality, to hell with him.”

Slaves’ refusal to be degraded and dehumanized and stand face to face with their masters cut right to the heart of the slave project! In many places, enslaved people outnumbered white people, sometimes 9:1. Although slave owners could rally militias and the military for support in extreme cases, day to day they simply relied on slaves to submit to their cruelty. As one slave owner said, “You need to whip a man to remind him he’s a ni**er.” Slave owners used violence to transform Black people to docile, compliant “ni**ers.” But this was easier said than done, as demonstrated by the writings of the formerly enslaved William Armistead:

“It may be said that the Slave is used to his yoke; that his sensibilities are blunted; that he receives, without a pang or a thought, the treatment which would sting other men to madness. And to what does this apology amount? It virtually declares that Slavery has done its perfect work, has quenched the spirit of humanity, that the Man is dead within the Slave. It is not, however, true that this work of abasement is ever so effectually done as to extinguish all feeling. Man is too great a creature to be wholly ruined by Man. When he seems dead, he only sleeps. There are occasionally some sullen murmurs in the calm of Slavery, showing that life still beats in the soul, that the idea of Rights cannot be wholly effaced from the human being.”

Enslaved people did not accept their lot. They did not allow themselves to be debased to the point where they felt that they deserved their mistreatment.

In an essay in Radical Teacher, Bennett Brazelton (2021) ponders the ethics of how most curriculums teach slavery, how the “truth” becomes conflated with a picture of exclusively one-directional violence: white people beat down Black slaves. They argue that framing history in a way that denies the agency of enslaved people, is not necessarily more truthful but is more traumatic and dehumanizing. Black people become objects of white abuse rather than subjective actors. In this “curriculum of tragedy,” as they call it, “black suffering, pain, and trauma take the center stage.”

Stories like the ones told here remind us that enslaved Black people were defiant in the face of injustice. We should be encouraged and strengthened by their resilience and remember that the fight is worthy of our time and energy even if we don’t win.

These are stories of triumph, not necessarily “winning,” but the triumph of resistance, the triumph of spitting in the face of an oppressor, the triumph of choosing one’s fate. People need to learn these stories of brutality. They need to learn how these people carved their way into history with hands, feet, bowie knives, hatchets, axes, hot embers, and frying pans. They need to let the bravery of their ancestors fill their hearts with pride.

For more stories of resistance from chattel slavery, see NotTodayStories.com where I read my favorite stories aloud and provide links to the data and information I use for the upcoming book.

If you want to begin or continue your own journey in anti-racism, check out our asynchronous trainings, including Dr. Reece's training Colorism and It's Origins, as well as our Anti-Racism Training, Black and Amplified, Racial Inequalities in Healthcare, and Environmental Racism & Justice here: https://www.driep.org/asynchronous-trainings