Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (50 page)

Vindictiveness toward white women who tonk black lovers or married them was written into the white mau's law. Colonial legislation in North Carolina, South Carolina, l\faryland and Vir ginia directed a white woman who bore a mulatto child to pay a fine to the court; in addition, her child might be placed in inden tured servitude until the age of 31 and the woman herself was bound out as a servant for five years or more. This one-way discour agement of interracial relations was not restricted to the South. A colonial Pennsylvania court ordered a white woman who bore a mulatto "bastard childe" to receive
21
lashes "on her beare backe." Enforcement like this was designed to serve as a fierce deterrent,

for the white man saw sexual activity between a black man and a white woman as
a
horrible threat to his hegemony. Rape, then, was

merely a matter of degree.

But when a white woman's reputation for chastity was open to question, the collective rage regarding her rape by a black man was considerably abated. During a forty-four year period in slaveholding Virginia ( 1789--1833 ) , out of sixty cases in which the courts im posed a death sentence on blacks convicted of interracial rape, the white woman's sullied past was raised as an issue af ter the trial in 27 instances, either in a jury's recommendation to the governor for mercy or in a citizens' petition demanding full pardon. Mitigating circumstances incorporated into these mercy pleas included the presence of mulatto children, no visible means of support, socializ ing on an equal basis with families of free blacks, a mother who socialized freely with blacks, and in the case of a slave named Peter convicted of raping one Patsy Hooker, a petition signed by 62 white men of Hanover County who swore, "The said Patsy Hooker

. . . is a common strumpet."

A QUESTION OF RACE
I
221

When a freedman named Tasco Thompson was sentenced to death in 1833 for an attempted rape of a young girl named Mary Jane Stevens in her mother's house, the foreman of the jury that voted to convict him filed a plea for mercy that contained a reveal ing discourse on the nature and purpose of the white man's rape law.

It was notorious [he wrote] that the mother had long enter tained Negroes, and that all her associations, with one or two excep tions, were with blacks . . . .
In
a word she was below the level of the ordinary grade of free Negroes. . . . There is no doubt that [Tasco Thompson] repaired to the house of Mrs. Stevens in the belief that she would cheerfully submit to his embraces, as she doubtless had often done before, but finding her absent he prob ably supposed his embraces would be equally agreeable to her daughter . . .

Having thus disposed of the facts in the case to his satisfaction, the foreman went on to say that he and his fellow jurors

considered that the law was made to preserve the distinction which should exist between our two kinds of population, and to protect the whites in the possession of their superiority; but here the whites had yielded their claims to the protection of the law by their volun tary associations with those whom the law distinguishes as their inferiors. As a prosecution would not have a claim in the case if the female concerned had been a colored girl, so the jury thought it hard to convict the prisoner for an offence not greater in enormity than had the prosecutrix been colored; but her maker had given her a white skin, and they had no discretion.

What was the argument in this and other pleas? Not that the crime of rape did not take place-the petitions do not address themselves to this point-but that the poor reputations of a certain class of white women render their rape a lesser crime even
if
their rapists are black. In the eyes of white men these women were damaged property before the crime and not worth the loss of a good slave or laborer.

Thus from slavery onward. the black man's fortune was ineX; tricabl and historicall linked to the white woman's reputation for

.
chastity, a terrifying
imbroglio
tha t the bla ck
m m
rnd
the
w
1te woman neither created nor controlled.

222
I
AGAINST OUR WILL

A memorable scene in D. W. Griffith's epic
The Birth of
a Nation shows a glorious gallop by white-hooded knights of the Ku Klux Klan in pursuit of a rolling-eyed black intent on rape who drove a beautiful and virginal blonde to suicide. It was Griffith's view, pictorially expressed, that the rise of the Klan was an heroic effort to save white womanhood from wholesale black assault dur ing the crisis of Reconstruction. This particular scene and others caused near-riots in front of some Northern movie houses when
The Birth
of a Nation was first released in
1915.
As I have detailed in another chapter, some of the Klan's nightriding, in fact, had ended in the rape of black women, or in the murder of black men whose crime had been not the desire for white women but the ownership of valuable land or the desire to vote. But as unpopular as
The
Birth
of
a Nation was among radicals in the North, it accurately reflected popular opinion in the white South, which did regard the Klan as heroic in its "defense" of white womanhood.

W.
J.
Cash, a thoughtful white Southerner, was at pains to

define what he called a pervasive Southern "rape complex" during the Reconstruction in
The Mind
of
the South.
"What the South erners
felt,"
he wrote, "was that any assertion of any kind on the part of the Negro constituted in a perfectly real manner an attack on the Southern woman. What they saw, more or less consciously, in the conditions of Reconstruction was a passage toward a condi tion for her as degrading, in their view, as rape itself."

Cash articulated the deepest fears of Southern white men in his book. Was not the logical result of emancipation, he wrote, that the black man would "one day advance the whole way and lay claim to complete equality, including, specifically, the crucial right of marriage?" And
if
this happened, the proudest privilege of white men would be destroyed-"the right of their sons in the legitimate line, through all the generations to come, to be born to the great heritage of white men." Adding to the white man's fears in Cash's analysis was the role played by Yankee scalawags and carpetbaggers who "provocatively" told their black friends "about the coming of a day when Negroes would take the daughters of their late masters for concubines."

As for the daughters, the object of all this attention and speculation, Cash wrote, "There was real fear, and in some districts even terror, on the part of the white women themselves. And there were neurotic old maids and wives, hysterical young girls, to react

A QUESTION OF RACE
I
223

to all this in a fashion well understood now, but understood by almost nobody then."

Cash published The Mind of the South in 1941, and by that time the view that Southern white women were given to neurotic, hysterical overreactions was being loudly trumpeted. Curiously, no such hysterical apprehension appears in Mary Boykin Chestnut's authentic Diary from
Dixie:
a little nervousness regarding attitudes toward women on the part of Sherman's advancing army, but no morbid fear of being raped by blacks. Nor had the prescient Fanny Kemble sensed any threat to her bodily safety during her stay on her husband's Georgia plantation, although she had been acutely sensitive to the rape of black women by both whites and blacks. And Margaret Mitchell, who achieved total empathy with the mind of a nineteenth-century white Southern woman in Gone with
the Wind,
imparted no such fears and terrors to Scarlett O'Hara. Scarlett's closest scrape with a criminal black during Reconstruc tion was over her money and not her body.

Whether or not one cares to accept an analysis of Southern white women as prone to neurosis and hysteria, and I do not accept it, the Southern rape complex that Cash described was all too real. Identification of the lynching of a black man with the rape of a white woman was so complete that a whispered euphemism, "the
one
crime," sufficed as explanation in both black and white circles. When the newly formed National Association for the Ad vancement of Colored People took on the job of tabulating lynch statistics in i912, one of its priorities was an attempt to verify just how many lynchings had been motivated by rape or the faintest suspicion of it. The tabulation was publishecl in
Thirty
Years
of
Lynching in the
United
States, a painfully documented booklet of more than 100 pages. From 1889 to 1918, the NAACP reported,
3,224
persons had been killed by lynch mobs,
2,838
of them (seven eighths of the total ) in the South. Seventy-eight percent of the victims were black. Sixty-one women were also among those

lynched,
50
of them black.*

Of the white men lynched,
8.4
percent had been accused of

* A terse NAACP report on a black female lynch victim: "May :z.6,
1911,
Okemah, Oklahoma.-A colored woman accused of having shot a sheriff was taken by a mob and, together with her fourteen-year-old son, was hanged from a bridge. The woman was raped before she was hanged."

2.24
AGAINST OUR WILL

"rape and attacks upon women." Among the blacks the percentage was
28.4.
The NAACP cautiously summed up,

It
may be fairly pointed out that in a number of cases where Negroes have been lynched for rape and "attacks upon white women," the alleged attacks rest upon no stronger evidence than "entering the room of a woman" or brushing against her. . . .
In
many cases, of course, the evidence points to bona fide attacks upon women . . . . It is apparent that lynchings of Negroes for other causes than the so-called "one crime" have for the whole period been a large majority of all lynchings and that for the past five years [1914-1918], less than one in five of the colored victims have been accused of rape or "attacks on women."