The cruelties of women

Since I am on this sad subject, I had marked this passage to share with you from Rebecca Smith Lee’s Mary Austin Holley: A Biography (University of Texas Press, 1962).

After Horace Holley’s death in 1827, Mary decided in 1829 to return to the Louisiana sugar plantation La Bonne Espérence, where the owners, the LaBranche family, had offered her a position as governess to their small daughters and where she could also teach her young son. Thus she experienced New Year’s Day on the plantation and “finishing the sugar.”

The weather was perfect for merrymaking, soft and bright and warm. After the slaves had feasted on fresh beef and casks of wine, they donned their best blackcoats and deresses, the women wearing colored kerchiefs round their heads and the men waving bright scarves as flags. Then they paraded in the dusk to the door of the big house shouting “Bonne Ann&ecute;e pour vous!” and making their bows to the master and mistress, to the noisy accompaniment of violins and kettle drums and tambourines.

There was one ceremonial Congo dance, done in the old, old manner. The most elderly of the men approached the master, bending first on one knee and then on the other, singing all the while in a weird minor key. It was an ancient ritual of homage from a faraway homeland, and the sight of the rapt black faces moved Mary Holley profoundly and in a curious way. She felt that Mr. Hermogene [LaBranche, the plantation owner] and the dancers were actors in a strange and primitive drama, controlled by inexorable forces, a drama in which she herself was not personally involved. By thus detaching herself from the tragic implications of the scene, she arrived at the mixed attitude toward slavery held by most of the people she knew in Kentucky. As she closed the letter to her daughter she could still hear the throbbing of the drums in the quarters half a mile away and she commented that the “rigors of slavery seem softened since I have seen these poor wretches in their gala time and witnessed so much benevolence in their master and mistress.” [p. 202]

This was, of course, the fairytale all the white plantation class told itself.

I’m not exactly sure where Lee stands on this. This book was written when the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was just beginning to heat up. But it is intended as a flattering biography of one of the Texas Austins. So it walks a thin sort of line that looks barbaric to our 21st century eye.

Compare it to this short passage from Catherine Clinton’s Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (HarperCollins, 2009):

When Mary was nineteen, her father was on the jury during the trial of an abusive mistress, Caroline Turner, who, among other depravities had thrown one of her slaves out a window. Her husband accused her of murdering half a dozen of their African-American charges—his tales were another catalogue of horrors, signs of slavery’s brutal effects. [pp. 22-23]

Helen Deiss Irvin shows us a somewhat less reverential side of the slave/mistress relationship in stories of Sophia Ward, a slave born in Clay County in 1837:

The mistress had an old parrott and one day I was in the kitchen making cookies, and I decided I wanted some of them, so I took out some and put them on a chair; and when I did this the mistress entered the door. I pick up the cushion and throw over the pile of cookies on the chair, amd Mistress came near the chair and the old parrot cries out, “Mistress burn, Mistress burn.” Then the mistress looks under the cushion, and she had me whipped, but the next day I killed the parrot, and she often wondered who or what killed the bird. [p. 51]

Or there was Sarah in Bourbon County:

Sarah is the biggest devil that ever lived, having poisoned a stud horse and set a stable on fire, also burnt Gen. R. Williams stable and stack yard with seven horses and other property to value of $1500. She was handcuffed and got away at Ruddles Mill on her way down the river, which is the fifth time she escaped when about to be sent out of the country. [pp. 51-52]

In spite of the gracious surface of life in antebellum Kentucky, there was always an undertone of fear. Margaretta Mason Brown, wife of Kentucky’s first U.S. Senator, wrote, in a letter to her husband that

the Monster Slavery may destroy the people of Kentucky before long [p. 57]

Margaretta Brown was an emancipationist, favoring a gradual freeing of the slaves. She feared that abolitionists would incite an uprising like that in Santo Domingo.

Slavery is the worm at the heart of the rose of U.S. democracy. Or maybe I should say it is one of the worms, the genocide of the indigenous nations being the other. It puts a taint on the very real achievements of these 19th century women.

On the other hand, humanity produces very few saints and those it does produce are not always nice folk.