7 - “Old God damn son-of-a-bitch, she gone on down to hell”

Summary

Historians have long stressed the significance enslavers accorded to public demonstrations of authority, dominance, and independence, as well as the wider significance of these ideals to the dynamics of slavery. Recent work on the violence and exploitation of slavery has reiterated the terrifying power enslavers wielded, and the harm this caused to enslaved people. In presenting enslavers as such dominant figures, however, there is a danger that we confirm their own self-image as masterful even while rejecting their claims of benevolence. A more nuanced narrative becomes possible when we consider how the performance of mastery came under pressure – both internal and external – as enslavers aged. Enslavers could not stop time from marching on and the pressures associated with aging – both real and imagined – wreaked havoc on their public and private claims of dominance. Enslaved people understood that mastery was never ordained, but instead embodied. Bodies, Black and white, enslaver and enslaved, were all subject to the “ravages of time.” Knowledge of this fact was applied when enslaved people crafted individual and collective strategies for survival and forms of resistance.