Mortifications Peculiarly Their Own

Abstract

This chapter explores the sexual exploitation of slavery and enslaved women’s feelings towards children born of rape and concubinage and their reactions to the white fathers of their children. A white man who sold his own offspring likely sold his daughters into the sex trade, underscoring how deeply imbedded rape was in the market economy and in the role of white planters as fathers.The act of rape connected the private realm of the southern home to the market. Sexual exploitation complicated identity and family formation in the slave South and could strengthen children’s identification with their enslaved mothers, or in the rare cases when white men offered preferential treatment to their mixed-race children, could erase Black mothers.