Relaciones internacionales.indb - HOMINES

WOMEN OF COLOUR: RECONTEXTUALISING ‘OTHERNESS’
The negro cares little for his father; but many are at a loss upon this
subject, for there are not a few females who are sufficiently cunning to
obtain presents for their children from two or more different men, whom
they separately claim as the fathers of their children. I recollect V., who
had two regular husbands, one in town and the other in the country; she
had been confined a daughter about ten days, when her grandmother
exhibited to me the presents of the papa to his little girl, [...] V. was determined
to have something from both husbands; and when the country
husband came to see her, she cursed him, “cause he had never once had
a thought for his pic-a-ninny;” 11
She further states:
From what I have said above, it will be gathered that negro females also
often have several husbands: but they have always one in particular, with
whom they live. The really respectable female negro, however, has generally
only one husband; and in this one particular only, is the respectable
female negro more moral than the male. 12
According to Mrs. Carmichael, Black women are immoral and few are
the exceptions. Bush suggests why a woman in Mrs. Carmichael’s position
would feel as she did: ‘Although [...][she], as a white woman, was
undoubtedly personally hostile, a marked tendency did exist, on the part
of white men, to transfer the blame for their sexual improprieties on to the
‘forwardness’ of black women and thus exonerate themselves’. 13
Bush discusses this within the context of the slave woman’s desire
to marry and also the European master’s intention to Christianise these
people. She also pointedly explores the relations between slave masters
and enslaved women and demonstrates the need to re-evaluate the master’s
discourse of condemnation against the enslaved women more along the
lines of Robert Young’s colonial desiring. 14
Despite the unflattering picture painted by white men, in practice the
physical appearance of black women failed to repel them sexually. Few
men, however, openly admitted to their attractions for and relationships
with slave women. The majority were hypocrites. They utilised the alleged
physical and moral inferiority of black women, in contrast to European
women, to establish them firmly in the role of the “other woman”;
one set of moral standards was applicable to white women, another less
11
Mrs. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured
and Negro Population of the West Indies 2 Vols. (New York, Negro
University Press, 1833), Vol. 1, p. 297.
12
Ibid., p. 298.
13
Bush (1990), op. cit., p. 18.
14
See: Robert Young on Colonial Desire in Colonial Desire (London, Routledge,
1995).
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Vol. XX, Núm. x - xxxxx de 2005 • HOMINES •