Secret history: the warrior women who fought their enslavers
Growing up in New York in the 1970s Rebecca Hall craved heroes she could relate to – powerful women who could take care of themselves and protect others. But pickings were slim. The famed feminists of the time, Charlie’s Angels and The Bionic Woman, didn’t cut it for her.
But every night when she went to sleep, her father would recount stories of her grandmother’s life. Harriet Thorpe was born into slavery 100 years earlier, in 1860, and was the “property”, she was told, of one Squire Sweeney in Howard County, Missouri.
“He told me about her struggles and how she still thrived in the face of them – she became a role model for me,” says Hall. “I wished I could go back in time and meet her.”
She couldn’t, but Hall was so inspired by Thorpe’s bravery that years later she found herself delving back in time, determined to uncover the untold stories of enslaved African women, just like Harriet, who fought their oppressors on slave ships, in plantations and across the Americas. The women warriors, she calls them, who had been written out of history. What began as a personal research project has culminated in a book, Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, which is published next month unusually in the form of a graphic memoir.
“It’s not like dumbing down. You look at the picture, the art, and you can see what’s happening,” Hall says.
The characters – including herself as narrator – are brought to comic-strip life with black and white illustrations and speech bubbles in the work of New Orleans artist Hugo Martínez. “The combination provides a way to look almost simultaneously into the past and the present, which was crucial for this story because it’s about haunting and the relationship between slavery, the United States and the current issues that we have today.
“It’s also about growing up in the wake of slavery – which is traumatic,” she says.
Hence the title of the book – Wake– which Hall says is intended to play on the meaning of a wake at a funeral, or the wake of a slave ship.
Before becoming a historian, Hall says her life was like living in that wake. Now 58, she worked as a tenants’ rights lawyer in Berkeley, California. But toward the end of the 1990s she became disillusioned. Racism and sexism were everywhere in the justice system, she says.
Sometimes she would walk into a courtroom and be directed to the defendant’s chair. “I’m not the defendant. I’m the attorney for the plaintiff,” she would bellow.
She felt the need to get to the root of what she saw as the racial issues “warping the world” – and made the life-changing decision to quit her job and dedicate herself to the study of chattel slavery. So it was back to college and Hall attained a PhD in 2004. “It was something I had to do – to understand my experience as a black woman in America today,” she says.
More than anything, having heard her grandmother’s story, Hall wanted to learn about female resistance to slavery – because so little was ever taught about it at school.
“If you’re a black child, you learn about slavery but you don’t learn about slave resistance or slave revolt in America,” Hall says.
“But if you’re taught the history of resistance, that our people fought every step of the way, that is a recovery that is crucial to our pride in our humanity and our strength and struggle. So the issue of slave resistance is something I think everyone should know about.”
She drew a blank though. Every book about slave revolts said more or less the same thing, that men led the resistance while enslaved women took a back seat. “I was like, what’s going on, I don’t believe it’s true,” says Hall.
So she started the painstaking process of sifting through the captain’s logs of slave ships, old court records in London and New York, letters between colonial governors and the British monarchy, newspaper cuttings, even forensic examinations from the bones of enslaved women uncovered in Manhattan.
Much of it made for difficult reading – human beings described time and time again in documents and insurance books as “cargo” with footnotes describing “woman slave number one and woman slave number two”. “Seeing them writing about mypeople as objects –It was horrific,” she says.
She learned that Lloyd’s of London was at the centre of the insurance market at the time, providing cover for slave ships, a “shameful” legacy for which it apologised last year. “They were insuring against the insurrection of cargo – I think that completely sums it up. How can cargo insurrect?” asks Hall.
As hard as this was to digest, it started to open new windows into the past – and as Hall pieced the information together she began to find women warriors everywhere, not only resisting their enslavers but planning and leading slave revolts.
In one example, Hall discovered that four women were involved in the 1712 revolt in New York, an uprising by enslaved Africans who killed nine of their captors before being, in some cases, burned at the stake. One pregnant woman was kept alive until she gave birth and then put to death (the execution was delayed, says the report, because the baby was “someone’s property”). Until now, it was assumed only men took part in this revolt.
Details are sparse – and many of the female rebels are nameless in the reports, or referred to with derogatory terms such as “Negro Wench” or “Negro Fiend” – so Hall had to fill in the blanks for her book, reworking the scenes in two of the chapters using what she calls “methodical use of historical imagination”.
She created names for some of the characters, such as Adobo and Alele – who fought for freedom in the Middle Passage, the terrifying journey from African slave ports to the New World slave markets.
“It was a real challenge for me because all of my writing before was academic,” she says. “Learning how to write visual script for a graphic novel was such a steep learning curve but it’s not like making up a story. It’s all historically grounded.”
Hall discovered that out of the 35,000 slave ship voyages documented, there were revolts in a tenth of them. And when she analysed the difference between ships that had revolts and those that didn’t, she discovered there were more women on the ships with uprisings.
“Historians literally say that this must be a fluke as we know that women didn’t revolt,” she says.
But closer examination of slave ship records showed key new facts.
There were procedures for running these ships, Hall explains – and right at the top was the instruction to keep everyone below deck and chained while you were on the coast of Africa.
“But once you got into the Atlantic, you unchained the women and children and brought them on deck,” she says.
That’s when Hall began to find stories of women accessing the weapons chests and finding ways to unchain the men below. “They used their mobility and access,” she says.
The conservative estimate is that 16 million Africans were brought to the Americas as enslaved people and while we don’t know exactly how many were women, we do know there were huge numbers, Hall says.
She hopes, now, that people will begin to realise how important these women were to resistance.
For graphic artist Martínez – who specialises in issues of struggle and resistance – illustrating the stories was particularly painful.
He highlights the image of the Brookes slave ship as the most “emotionally
charged” he had to draw. It’s a sketch depicting how enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas – with 454 people crammed into the hold. “There are lots of moments that are intense but there’s something about that picture where you can maybe feel the weight of what it is to be a human who’s been turned into cargo,” he says. “It was extremely difficult for me to draw”
The book, Hall says, was only ever intended as a passion project – if not to heal then at least to come to terms with the trauma of slavery in her own past.
But after a small kickstarter project, it became the target of a bidding war among multiple publishers, with Simon & Schuster offering the highest ever advance for this type of illustrated novel.
It’s a measure of the importance of the theme – though Hall says she was gobsmacked.
“I felt like I was stumbling backwards – into everything that happened,” she says.
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts is published on 1 June. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com
Jews to reclaim ownership of property lost before 1948. Palestinians have no equivalent legal means to reclaim property that became part of the state of Israel at the same time. “The law is written to privilege Jews over non-Jews. It is house-by-house, neighbourhood-byneighbourhood apartheid,” said Yousef Munayyer, a Palestinian political analyst.
The families at the heart of the dispute have lived there since the 1950s, after being forced to abandon or flee their homes in the fighting that preceded the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948. They were rehoused in Sheikh Jarrah by the UN.
“The settlers are thieves supported by the government. We will not leave our homes,” said Muhammad al-Sabbagh, 71, a plumber who has lived in Sheikh Jarrah for 56 years.
That anger, and resentment of life as second-class citizens, also contributed to an unprecedented and devastating wave of communal violence that erupted in Israeli towns with mixed Jewish and Arab populations over the last week. It included mobs rampaging through businesses and destroying places of worship, street beatings and attempted raids on homes. It was a disturbing new dimension to a conflict whose other aspects, including Israeli airstrikes on Gaza and rockets from Gaza falling into Israel, have played out before during previous outbreaks of hostilities.
Rights groups in Israel have long documented systemic discrimination against Palestinian citizens of the country. Most live in Arab-majority towns that are poorly resourced, with higher levels of unemployment and overcrowded housing. In 2018, the Knesset passed a “Jewish nation-state” law, which declared only Jews had the right to self-determination in Israel and stripped Arabic of its status as an official language alongside Hebrew.
At the time, Ayman Odeh, the head of the Israeli Arab Joint List group of parties, said the Knesset had passed “a law of Jewish supremacy and told us that we will always be second-class citizens”. Before a general election the following year, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrote on Instagram: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens … Israel is the nation-state of the Jewish people – and them alone.” Yet nearly two million Israelis, or 20% of the population, are Palestinian – mainly Muslim, but some Christians and some Druze. Nearly all are descendants of people who remained in Israel after the state was declared in May 1948. Most were offered citizenship of the new state.
They have family in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza or among the refugee communities of Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere.
Many fear the wounds of communal violence will take years to heal, but Prof Gideon Rahat, senior fellow in the political reform programme at the
Israel Democracy Institute, said the attacks had horrified most of Israeli society, and he believed deep economic integration would help restore faith between communities.
“We are mixed in everyday life more than ever before, and most of the people are not part of this violence,” Rahat said, citing demonstrations against the violence by both Jews and Arabs and a range of politicians speaking out. “Even people from the right wing are trying to put the fire out. Of course the extreme right are happy about the situation as they want to have a zero-sum game, but many of the other forces are trying.”
Even without the fallout from communal violence, the conflict has reshaped the Israeli political landscape overnight.
Long-serving prime minister Netanyahu was on the brink of losing his post to a nearly formed coalition government, after failing to secure a majority in the fourth general election in two years. The deal being brokered by Yair Lapid, centrist leader of the opposition, would have brought an Arab Israeli party into government for the first time in Israel’s history. The negotiations have all but collapsed; the Islamist party Raam has withdrawn.
The conflict has also partly neutralised Benny Gantz, who is defence minister but also one of Netanyahu’s main rivals for power and key to any coalition. He is now focused on the military campaign, and working closely with the prime minister.
“Netanyahu was days away from getting ousted. [The new coalition] was already set up and ready to go,” said Drucker, the Channel 13 analyst.
“Surely this escalation served him very, very well, because this government that was formed just collapsed. And he will be staying in office in the coming months, maybe for a few years.”
crafting a work history is notably laissé faire. She largely refrained from fact checking the book with her sources. And indeed, there are factual errors in the text.
Perhaps most egregiously, Schulman
asserts that today “large numbers” of people with HIV “cannot” gain access to treatment due to lack of health insurance. In fact, thanks to the 1990 Ryan White Care Act, the federal government provides safety net coverage for the care and treatment of the virus to the uninsured or underinsured.
Steven W Thrasher, an assistant professor of journalism and LGBTQ health at Northwestern University, praised Schulman’s book as a “wonderful entry into Aids history” and a “necessary corrective” to previous works about Act Up that have focused “on a handful of white guys.” But he also noted her lack of footnotes.
“She says in the beginning she’s not a trained historian,” Thrasher said, “and so it should be read as a work of community history. But people might be expecting something else when they’re reading it. They might be expecting a trained historian.”
Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up New York, 1987–1993 is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux