The period of slavery is a shameful one in the history of the USA. The idea of people’s treating other people as their property should have been disgusting and humiliating not only to those who were segregated but also to the ones who were the actual doers. The most outraging is the fact that slave holders had no pity even for females and children, the weakest ones. Moreover, females were objects of additional harassments – the sexual abuse, with male slave holders using black women to satiate lust and thirst for power. Unfortunately, most female slave holders did not see anything wrong in what their men did to poor black women-slaves since white women did not consider black ones to be their rivals, just “the garbage-bin” in which their husbands “relieved” themselves (Cooper). Octavia E. Butler in her novel Kindred and California J. Cooper in her Family dwell on the peculiarities of the relationships between slaves and slave holders. Both authors make a strong emphasis on the fact that the close interaction between the two groups led to the formation of particular family connections between slaves and their masters, which not always resulted in making the lives of slaves easier.
Both novels under consideration underline the significance of family relationships, which is obvious even due the names the authors chose for their works – Kindred and Family. The main characters of both novels struggle for saving their families, either their ancestors, like in Kindred, or descendants, like in Family. The main idea, though, in both novels is to show racial discrimination of people in the antebellum period of the U.S. history. As the main characters in the novels are women, the details of black women’s sexual abuse by their masters are at the forefront. Butler and Cooper describe the humiliation and cruelty black women had to withstand because they had no right to protest. Death was the only escape for them. Cooper’s Family depicts numerous examples of women’s killing themselves either because they did not want to stand the abuse any more or because they wanted to stop the suffering both for their children and themselves. In Butler’s Kindred, Alice Greenwood also hangs herself because she is told that her children have been sold and she does not imagine her life without them since her children were the only reason she put up with Rufus’s presence in her life. Though Dana from Butler’s Kindred is a woman living in our time, she, in a way, explains why so many black women of the past killed themselves. Dana says to her husband about her relationships with Rufus and a possibility of his raping her: “He has to leave me enough control of myself to make living look better than killing and dying” (Butler, 246). Of course, “control of themselves” was too much for black women-slaves of the past, but the idea is the same – white men had to leave something for those women as a reason to live, usually this reason being their children.
The most terrible thing about all this, though, that the children with whom those poor women had to part with were also their masters’ children. However, those children were not perceived as a connection between a man and a woman. Women thought those children to be only theirs while men, in most cases, did not pay attention to the fact that the black women abused by them bore children. It seems the white men considered those children to be either an extra inconvenience or an extra slave to be sold for the sake of financial gain. More often than not, the white slave holders wanted to get rid of light slaves resembling them. The main character of Cooper’s Family says: “My mother had nine more children for the Master of the Land, but they was all sold when they got to be bout three years old by the Mistress of the Land cause they was too white and lookin like the Master of the Land. That, and the money” (Cooper). Though the situation shown in Butler’s Kindred is a little different and Alice’s children live with her, Rufus keeps on threatening Alice that he will sell them if she does not obey him.
The situation with female slave holders is not radically different, the only exception being that white women did not abuse their female slaves sexually. They did not feel sympathy for poor black women and their children, but rather hatred and, sometimes, jealousy because of their husbands. There are some instances in the novels, though, that depict the moments of understanding or pity expressed by white female slave holders. The most straightforward example of this kind is Sue, Doak Butler’s first wife, from Cooper’s Family. She is described as a hard-working young woman with a kind heart who was never really cruel towards her husband’s slaves, including Always whom she sometimes suspected of being her husband’s sex toy. However, at the same time even she did not take the black woman’s feelings and physical condition into consideration when she personally needed something. Let us take as an example the episode of Sue’s giving birth to her child. She asks Always to serve her, even though Always is also pregnant and does not feel very good with her legs swollen. Cooper relevantly explains Sue’s behavior in her first description of this woman: “She did believe she was superior to the darker race cause it had been bred in her, but she was not cruel” (Cooper). No other instances of really humane behavior of white women towards black ones can be observed in the novels in question. Perhaps, there is one more episode when the word “pity” can be applied in reference to white women’s attitude to female slaves. It is the moment when Always is being sold to Doak Butler. Cooper says that the Young Mistress “was human and she felt a few pangs of sorrow for this girl she had known since she was a baby” (Cooper). However, it does hot help when Always and her little sister Plum are crying heart-piercingly when they are being separated.
Thus, the two novels of modern female writers explicitly reveal the circumstances under which black women-slaves of the antebellum era had to survive and raise their children often born from their masters – from the men whom they hated. There was no such phenomenon as white women’s sympathy for their black counterparts. There were only rare instances when white women decided not to worsen their female slaves’ lives by being extra cruel to them. White female women were ready to make black women-slaves’ lives easier only in case those changes promised extra conveniences for themselves.
Works Cited
Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Boston: Beacon, 1979. Print.
Cooper, California J. Family. New York: Anchor Books, 1992. Web. 19 March 2016.
