American Trauma In Slavery

To start, it is important to take into account the fact that the trauma people faced under slavery is not comparable to any other form of violence that is usually associated with people living under states of war or occupation. Unlike war, people who grow up in slavery do not perceive their situation as “temporary”. Unlike those living in war zones, slaves do not have the “luxury” of living with the hope that one day all of this misery would be over and they can finally return to living their peaceful lives, similar to those living under a “typical” form of trauma. Therefore, in the case of slavery, the destruction of the psyche begins at the moment the woman slave gives birth to her slave infant. Moreover, the child who is born into slavery

is taught how to survive through obeying the master and mistress, and by never attempting to leave the plantation (Schwartz, 108). Hence, the “survival” they have been taught, is not through escaping slavery, but by submitting to its rules. Therefore, the trauma that is left on the slave is not only related to the images of physical violence the slave may have witnessed, which includes imprisoning, whipping, raping and even killing.

However, it further includes the whole state of enslavement, from the intensive labor to being put in captivity in the plantation for life, all the way through the daily rituals that slaves go through when interacting with the slave owners. Moreover, the slave lives through a cycle of living that is built around fear and submission. This act of systematic destruction was not intended to target only slaves as individuals. In fact, the process of destruction was aimed towards the community as a whole. For example, though the slaves were meant to “breed” other slaves for the master to capitalize on, he or she can not protect their family members from the assaults of that same master, or even the overseers. Furthermore, any interference from a slave to protect any other slave, can result in severe consequences, in which whipping might be the lightest punishment, or in worst cases, the slave might get killed by the master (Gowin, 94). As a result, for many, even after leaving slavery, moving forward with their lives, was a difficult challenge, especially with the memory of the people that they have left behind, dead or

alive.
As a part of a project that was carried out by the National Park Service in the nineties of the twentieth century, the Hampton’s archive conducted several interviews with a number of people who were related to someone who have worked or lived at a certain point throughout history in the Hampton. However, of those interviews only two of a total of eleven, were done with relatives of people who were once enslaved in the Hampton. These two interviewees were for women who were descendants of freed people; Sarah Henrietta Howard and Dorothy Norris Corner. When Sarah Henrietta Howard talked about her grandfather, Charles Hall Brown, who was a slave of the Ridgely’s, she kept pointing out that her grandfather never talked about his life as a slave. John Ridgely, a slave owner fathered Brown after raping and impregnating one of his slaves. For that, Sarah Howard believes that her grandfather’s silence is mainly due to the shame that he felt due to the fact that he was an illegitimate child of a slave owner. Furthermore, Howard also mentioned that her grandfather believes that he himself should not have had any children, as she explains; “since he was an illegitimate child, he thought it was a sin to have kids” (Oral). While, Sarah Howard elucidated her grandfather’s silence as a result of the sense of guilt and shame he carried with him, social science scholars perceive avoidance and silence as signs of having a psychological trauma. According to Ignacio Martín-Baró, the reason why victims of violence tend to not speak about the aggression they have faced, is mainly out of fear of the social consequence that they believe it could cause (Faúndez). Accordingly, the freed people were facing social consequences at two levels, one within their own communities, and the other is to the larger American society, which basically means white Americans, including the former slave owners.
Moreover, Richard Follett in his book “The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation”, discussed what he called the “inheritance ideology”, which in his opinion, restricted the freedom of many emancipated African Americans in the nineteenth century (Follett, 50).

Thereafter, even though the freed people have struggled to maintain an individualistic identity, and fought for the right to whole citizenships, in most cases white masters held the position of superiority towards those who once were their slaves. In the case of Charles Hall Brown, according to his granddaughter, he was bound to the Ridgelys in so many ways. At first, though Charles Brown attempted to leave Baltimore, he had to turn back, and ask for legal papers to prove his manumission, as he feared that he would be mistaken for an escapee, he then never left again. Secondly, after his manumission, Charles Brown worked as a doorman at the Old Baltimore Club, where he frequently encountered many members of the Ridgely family (Oral). Under these circumstances, Charls Brown, is in the service of his old slave owners, yet again. Whilst, Sarah Howard did not, or could not talk about her grandfather’s feelings towards his life as a slave, Ivan Schulman favors a “xenophobic ideology”, in the introduction he wrote for “Autobiography of a Slave” by Juan Francisco Manzano, who was a freed man from the sugar plantations in Cuba. Schulman believes that the manners and the culture of the white man, is better than his own

culture (Manzano, 11). This sense of shame towards one’s own past and community as well as, the creation of a social and political structure that generates identity crisis within the oppressed, many see as a continuation of blatant violence against slaves and Blacks in general (Manzano, 12). Furthermore, this xenophobic ideology was rooted in the psyche of both the slave and the slaveholder, mainly through racist theology. More effectively, through the enlisting of biblical stories, such as the prophecy of Noah and his son Ham, in which the myth about Africans being the descendent of Ham, who was cursed by his own father Noah, to have a son who would be enslaved to his brothers (Brooten, 43).
In addition to the inherited ideology, often people who are victims of violence, and do suffer from traumatic experience, enact their past, and are rarely able to escape it (LaCapra, 21). Especially, when these victims have not been treated properly from that experience. Robert Glenn, a former slave said:
“Freedom came many ways and by no means all at one time. Sometimes it was years coming after the war, and to some it never seemed to have come at all” (Woodward).
This testimony in particular, vividly demonstrates the imprisonment of many former slaves, in their own traumatic past.
Notably, this feeling of shame does not necessarily affect specific individuals, neither is it exclusive to those who were children of the masters born out of rape. In fact, Dorothy Roberts talks about the tendency by “black elites” to create a “respectable” image of black women, especially after the emancipation (Brooten, 42). This image tries to quiet and conceal the sexual tyranny enslaved women went through. This act of silencing, comes in an effort to “de-sexualize” the black female body, which was the main subject of sexual violence during the two hundred years of slavery. Furthermore, even though the slave woman’s narrative, just as the slave man’s, both are accounts to highlight the savagery of slavery. However, women who wrote their stories, hardly mention the sexual violations slave women went through (Foster). Nevertheless, the absence of the sexual violations from the slave woman’s told story, does not necessarily imply the absence of those crimes, it is more of an attempt by these women - who by any mean are not weak- to overcome the calamity of this experience.