besides his own family a dusky brood of colored women. No likely girl escaped the overseers. Poor whites and pinelanders broke into black quarters and ravished where they would. There seemed little squeamishness, and there was little enough effective resistance on the part of black girls. The institution of slavery with its cruelties had brutalized men’s minds. As for the Negro women, one can well understand how little feminine[13] shame would remain when the bare hips were so commonly exposed and flogged.

[13]

“Oh, but don’t you know—did nobody ever tell or teach any of you that it is a sin to live with men who are not your husbands?” asked Fanny Kemble of a slave. The latter seized her vehemently by the wrist and exclaimed:

“Oh, yes, missie, we know—we know all about dat well enough; but we do anything to get our poor flesh some rest from the whip; when he make me follow him into de bush, what use me tell him no? He have strength to make me.”[2]

Probably the slave drivers and other white men obtained some sensual gratification from flogging women. Brutality of this kind is often associated with sexual perversity. The taking of Negro women showed a will toward the animal and was an act of greater depravity than ordinary deflections from the straight and moral way. Not that there was not pride in pale babies and even a readiness on the part of some Negresses to give themselves to white men. As a plantation song said: “Twenty-four black girls can’t make one mulatto baby by themselves.”

By flogging and rape and inhuman callousness did the white South express its reaction to black slavery. There were also burnings,[14] demoniacal tortures, flogging to death, and every imaginable human horror. It may well be asked: How came it about that those who protested so high-mindedly about the introduction of slavery did not use the slaves kindly and humanly when they were forced to have them?

[14]

The answer I think lies in the fact that no man is good enough to have complete control over any other man. No man can be trusted. Give your best friend or neighbor power over you, and you’ll be surprised at the use he will make of it. Even wives and children in this respect are not safe in the hands of their husbands and parents if they are understood as possessions. “She belongs to me and I’ll kill her,” Gorky makes a drunken cobbler say. “Ah, no, she does not belong to you; she is a woman, and a woman belongs to God,” says the Russian 

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