Fanny, Nanny, Leah, Sophy, Sally, Charlotte and Sarah emerge within the bounds of the Pierce Butler archives–its diaries, letters, archival fragments, probate records and advertisements–where narratives surrounding what their enslaved flesh affords chattel slavery takes precedent.[1] To trace the gratuitous violence that marks their life is to narrate glimmers into a fleeting archive that continues to reproduce silence and dispossession as hegemony.[2] How do we bear witness to those with no testimonies to bear? What of their knowledge production can be exhumed from the archive? This question of archival silence becomes salient to our reconstruction of the slave hospital and its care network that emerges on the Butler plantation estates from 1774-1859. Given this silence, how does the slave hospital become a crossroad where the paradoxical analytic of care continues to determine Black existence today?
On the Butler plantation estates of Butler and St. Simons Islands in Georgia, we are left with the names of these enslaved women who I name as the facilitator of the crossroads–the interstice between the world of the living, the socially dead and the realm of the physically dead. The term crossroads emerges in the field of Africana Religions by way of the Divinity of the crossroads–Esu Elegba in the Yoruba tradition.[3] This divinity operates as the mediator between humans and the invisible worlds. I locate these enslaved women in an ontological and metaphysical crossroad at the behest of the determinant care of the master and slavery’s machinations. With this, who is cared for and by whom is always a religious and political enterprise. Within its positive orientation, care work is an ethic that privileges the well-being and sustenance of others. It attends to the living and socially dead, materializing as a balm to assuage antiblack violence. However, even within its positive frame, care is always a problem for thought as violence always and already precedes its deployment.
In light of this, I am interested in how the libidinal economy of slavery structures the analytics of care in the slave hospital. I argue that care as an analytic is the always constant negotiation between the Black body’s physical death and its already prefigured social death–a crossroad– a position of being deemed non-existent, non-human even as one is presently alive. Care as such is an analytic that is historically contingent on race, gender, class, sexuality and ability. It is a disciplining arrangement subsumed within asymmetrical power relations The violence of plantation care, its misnaming and misrecognition not only continues the logic of slavery but congeals itself into the structural edifice of the hospital byway of religious and scientific violence. By examining this pernicious relation, I intend to show how acts of care in the slave hospital furthers the (un)gendering violence of the unprotected female flesh.[4] The aforementioned women and caretakers such as Midwife Rose, Mary, Binah, Nurse Molly, Sinda the prophetess, and Old negress Sackey, provides us with an entry point into this crossroad to interrogate how the act of caring for the enslaved repeating body indexes the limits in which it can be violated while illuminating the stakes of black care—a mode of endurance betwixt redress and subjugation, continuously at the behest of the ongoing laceration at hand. [5]
Ultimately, this proposal seeks to consider how care is an analytic suffused with coercion, racial assemblages, religious, ungendering and power asymmetries that takes hold and shape in the slave hospital. The political economy of care networks sustains and reforms at best the antagonistic, paradigmatic conditions of the master-slave relation. How we disrupt this political economy structured by the libidinal suffering of the blackened is critical to how we rethink care in African American Religious History and the History of Medicine.
[1] Francis Ann Kemble, “Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39,” Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1863, 190-191.
[2] For an engagement with “Black Venus,” see Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in two acts." Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (2008). Hartman employs the term to note the fate of all enslaved women in the archives who are rendered mute and beholden to narratives outside of their control. For an extended account of the predicament of Venus, see Janelle Hobson’s Venus in the Dark: Blackness and Beauty in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2005).
[3] Dianne M. Stewart, Three eyes for the journey: African dimensions of the Jamaican religious experience. Oxford University Press, 2005, 168.
[4] Hortense Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe." An American Grammar Book (2009), 446.
[5] These women names show up in various places throughout the Butler plantation archives enacting various forms of carework. Even as their names may not appear again throughout the paper, I note them to disrupt the archives seemingly pernicious ways of sublating them all into one. For an engagement with “black care,” see Calvin Warren, “Black Care,” 46.
Normatively, the analytic of care has been theorized within a positive orientation situating care practices as a liberatory salve against anti-black violence. Care as such fails to account for how violence is ordained and materializes vis-a-vis care for the black. "Too black for care" writes Frank Wilderson is the structural position of the blackened. This proposal examines the religious and scientific violence that undergirds the ways in which the enslaved person is cared for and enacts their own care work in the slave hospital on the Butler plantation estates of Butler and St. Simon Islands in Georgia from 1774-1859. How do we think of care and what it means for the enslaved person to be cared for in this site? I contend that the exemplary violence and libidinal economy of slavery is continued and congealed within the religio-scientific analytic of care which continues to determine the blackened existence today.