Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women's Lethal Resistance by Nikki M. Taylor (review)

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• Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance by Nikki M. Taylor
• Oran Patrick Kennedy

Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance. By Nikki M. Taylor. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2023. Pp. [viii], 247. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-009-27684-9.)

In her latest monograph, Nikki M. Taylor delves into the history of enslaved women’s lethal resistance in the United States. Through an in-depth analysis of newspaper records, trial and court records, and other primary sources, Taylor demonstrates that countless enslaved women, in response to inhumane treatment, conspired to murder their enslavers. In doing so, they conceptualized an alternative framework for justice.

Spanning from the colonial era to the antebellum period, the book follows a broadly chronological structure. Each chapter is oriented around a specific case study. Chapter 1, for instance, focuses on Philis and Phoebe, two enslaved women in Massachusetts who, in 1755, were convicted of poisoning their enslaver, Captain John Codman. Meanwhile, chapter 7 examines the case of Lucy, an enslaved woman in Galveston, Texas, who murdered her enslaver’s wife in 1858. Other chapters explore cases of lethal resistance in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and Virginia. The chapters themselves vary in length, which, as Taylor notes, reflects “the fullness or scarcity of the archive across space and time” (p. 20). Nevertheless, Taylor’s analysis is undoubtedly impressive in scope.

Across nine chapters, Brooding over Bloody Revenge: Enslaved Women’s Lethal Resistance vividly details how enslaved women planned and carried out the murder of their enslavers. Their methods included poisoning, drowning, arson, and physical assault. Each case study examines a method of lethal resistance. At the end of each chapter, Taylor discusses similar documented examples of lethal resistance that were recorded elsewhere. However, Brooding over Bloody Revenge is not an exhaustive study of enslaved women’s lethal resistance. Taylor acknowledges that “it is hard to know with certainty how many enslaved women murdered their enslavers in the United States before 1865” (p. 2). Regardless, the structure and organization of the book enable readers to become more invested in each case study.

Taylor’s most compelling and original argument is that enslaved women constructed a “framework of a Black feminist practice of justice,” which, at its core, “boiled down to a sense of fairness, decency, justness, and humane treatment” (p. 9). They were motivated to kill their enslavers by an overriding sense of injustice, usually brought about by cruelty and inhumane treatment. In this sense, they did not set out to dismantle the institution of slavery or to [End Page 607] obtain their personal freedom. Rather, they sought personal revenge and their own quest for justice. Yet, as Taylor writes, enslaved women only resorted to lethal resistance “when other options to alleviate injustice, unfairness, abuse, and suffering” were fully “exhausted” (p. 11). Moreover, Taylor makes the important point that the use of lethal force “was not simply murder,” but also an essential form of “slave resistance” (p. 3).

Overall, Taylor places such “lethal resistance within a framework of a Black feminist practice of justice” that centers the experiences and perspectives of enslaved women at the heart of these cases (p. 9). This lens helps explain the rationale behind the more shocking examples from the book. In one graphic example from chapter 3, Taylor focuses on Cloe, an enslaved woman in Pennsylvania who drowned her enslaver’s young children. Taylor illustrates how the murder of young children was consistent with Cloe’s and her peers’ Black feminist practice of justice. She notes the children were “imbued with all the power, privilege, and authority of slaveholders” and were “the heiresses of a system predicated on white superiority” (p. 86). Consequently, enslaved women like Cloe created their own framework of justice that, at its heart, maintained “that the proportionality of revenge is best determined by the victims of the unjust acts” (p. 12). In closing, Brooding over Bloody Revenge is an essential title for historians of Black women’s violent resistance to slavery.

Oran Patrick Kennedy Leiden University Copyright © 2024 The Southern Historical Association ...