The Enslaved Women Who Fought Back
An exploration of lethal resistance, then and now, with Professor Nikki M. Taylor
In Brooding Over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance, Professor Nikki M. Taylor (Howard University) tells seven different stories about enslaved women who refused to tolerate injustice any longer. In her book, and in conversation, Professor Taylor sheds light on why these women committed lethal acts of resistance and how women trafficked today sometimes resort to the same.
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes discussion of a Black feminist practice of justice, how women were often more effective than men in resisting slavery, and more:
Ben: Professor Taylor, I’m excited to speak with you.
NMT: I'm excited to be here.
Ben: Today, I’d like to explore why various women “made the decision to use murder as the ultimate form of resistance to slavery,” to use your words.
To frame our conversation, can you talk about the concept of “just deserts”?
NMT: “Just deserts” is an ancient concept, found in the Code of Hammurabi, the Bible, and the Torah. In fact, the entire American judicial system is built on the concept of “just deserts.” It's the idea that people should get a punishment proportionate to the crime they committed. As an example, if you were to steal someone's purse at the shopping mall, we wouldn't expect you to be executed for that, right?
So you might read my book and think, why are these women killing the so-called “innocent”? But the concept of “just deserts” allows you to see that these women were not crazy, impulsive, or angry, as misleading stereotypes might suggest. Rather, they sought justice proportionate to the crimes committed against them.
Ben: As you write, “The intersectionality of their oppression – as women, African Americans, and enslaved people – made them less likely to obtain legitimate forms of justice.” Consequently, they were “more likely to seize it with their own hands.”
Can you talk a bit about who these women were?
NMT: I cover women enslaved from the colonial era up to the Civil War. Many of them were isolated and disconnected from communities, working alone on their enslavers’ property. Many of their enslavers were brutal. Their work was unrelenting and unending, and that’s not even to mention the punitive measures they suffered.
With premeditation, the women targeted the people who denied them their dignity: their enslavers or the children of their enslavers.
Ben: For these women, “Every member of their owner’s family was complicit in their abuse and denied humanity,” you observe.
NMT: Exactly.
Take for example a teenager enslaved in Pennsylvania, named Cloe. She was a “term slave,” which is different than a regular enslaved person. It meant she’d be freed at the age of twenty-eight. Until then, she’d be subjected to “term slavery,” which was isolating and inhumane in its own way.
Ben: It’s kind of like telling Cinderella that her stepsisters will no longer be her relatives—in twelve years.
NMT: Ha, that’s right.
Cloe was sold to many different people within a short amount of time. She ended up in the hands of the Carothers family, who brought her back to rural Pennsylvania, near where she’d been born.
The Carothers’ home was very small, and without a doubt, Cloe didn't have any personal space of her own. Imagine an isolated young woman, trying to wash herself, with other people looking on. Her work included the fields, cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes. There was nothing her mistress, as the slave-owning wife was usually called, didn't ask her to do.
In the course of all those duties, the Carothers’ children were an extension of the mistress. She assigned her children to watch Cloe and make sure she wasn’t shirking her work. When they tattled on her, Cloe suffered brutal beatings that, in her mind, weren’t in line with whatever her transgressions were.
Cloe developed her own sense of what was just and not just in that context. She decided to target the children, calculating that her mistress would be so distraught that at least for a short period of time, the beatings would stop.
But like all of the women in my book, murder was a last resort. Cloe tried everything in her power to push back against the inhumanity she suffered. She acted out, talked back, disobeyed, probably feigned illness, and committed all sorts of other everyday acts of resistance. She even tried to burn the house down, thinking it might force the family to put her up for sale, but it didn’t work.
Ben: For other enslaved women, fire did work. You surmise it was “the most formidable, if not effective, weapon enslaved women wielded.” Fire had the capacity to destroy everything their owners valued.
NMT: That’s right.
And I think the biggest slaveholder fear—they talk about it a lot in their diaries—was that they would be bludgeoned to death as they slept. Their fear was warranted. I describe an enslaved woman named Jane Williams, in Richmond, who bludgeoned her enslavers in their sleep.
Other enslavers heard about the kinds of resistance that Jane and Cloe carried out.
Ben: I hadn’t previously considered the fear that captive women inspired in enslavers, particularly when it came to poison, another common weapon they used.
NMT: I hadn't considered it before either. These women made me appreciate how, as much power as enslavers wielded, it was really diminished if every bite of food they took could lead to their deaths.
Ben: By your telling, in the process, enslaved women managed to disrupt slavery. In one example, after an enslaved woman in Galveston named Lucy bludgeoned her mistress with a hatchet, the mistress’ family never purchased another enslaved person again.
NMT: Yes. Imagine how unstable slavery was with these women living in close proximity, suffering regular injustice, and whose loyalty couldn’t be counted on because of it.
Ben: Can you talk about what the women faced after their lethal resistance? In all seven stories, they seem to know that the justice system would offer them anything but justice.
NMT: After writing this book, I started calling the justice system the judicial system instead.
Every one of these women, like enslaved people across time and space, were denied any sort of due process. They were denied bail, arrest warrants, and habeas corpus, meaning no explanation had to be offered to a judge for their detainment. In many cases, they were denied defense attorneys, and even when they did have attorneys, the attorneys often didn’t have time to build a defense. Many of the women were brought to trial within a day or two. And when they were on trial, there was no jury of their peers. Rather, by law, jury members in many places had to be enslavers.
In all of these ways, for enslaved people, and often also for free Black people, the judicial system was a burlesque. It was a mockery of a justice system. All of the women I studied knew as much. Almost all of them were ultimately executed, as they knew they would be.
But that was okay with them. Their goal was relief from their cruel owners; a reprieve from the injustice and denied humanity.
Ben: It’s chilling to read toward the end of your book about the injustice and humanity still denied to women trafficked today. How do you reflect on the actions of the women in Brooding Over Bloody Revenge when looking at examples of modern slavery?
NMT: When writing, I couldn’t help but think of people like Cyntoia Brown Long, a Black woman who survived sex trafficking.
In 2006, when she was sixteen years old, Long was convicted of murdering a man there to have sex with her. The judicial system refused to see her as a victim, and she was sent to prison for life. Neither the judge nor the jury understood her powerlessness. Long served fifteen years and lost her entire youth, finally attaining clemency in 2019.
In 2018, seventeen-year-old Chrystul Kizer killed her white trafficker in Wisconsin. After Kizer killed him, in shades of some of the more colorful women in my book, she set fire to his house and stole his BMW. And like the women I cover, when officials finally caught up with her, Kizer said she believed she was avenging a wrong. She felt that she needed to stop her trafficker from what he was doing to other young women.
But prosecutors in Kenosha, Wisconsin, refused to see her as the victim and denied her a self-defense plea. Her case went on and on from one court to the next with her trying to claim self-defense. Eventually, she won.
To me, all of these stories are cautionary tales of what happens when slavery is heaped upon powerless Black women. Until the judicial system recognizes Black women’s humanity, they may end up taking the law into their own hands.
Ben: An insightful conclusion to end on. I’m changing “justice system” to “judicial system” in all of my notes right now.
NMT: There you go!
Ben: Professor Taylor, thank you so much for your time and scholarship.
NMT: Thank you, Ben.