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IN 1787 AN ENSLAVED MAN IN Maryland raped a free black woman. The story comes to us from the female victim in the incident, Elizabeth Amwood. One white man, William Holland, had her "Pull up her Close and Lie Down he then Called a Negrow Man Slave" "and ordered him to pull Down his Britches and gitt upon the said Amwood and to bee grate with her." A fourth individual in this horrific scene, a white man named John Pettigrew, operating with Holland, pointed a pistol at the unnamed enslaved man and Elizabeth Amwood. AU the while, Holland taunted them both, asking if it "was in" and "if it was sweet." Afterward, William "went up into die Company and Called for Water to wash his hand, saying he had bin putting a Mare to a horse."1
Scholars have suggested that rape can serve as a metaphor for enslavement - thus applying to both men and women who were enslaved. As Aliyah I. Abdur-Rahman argues, "The vulnerability of all enslaved black persons to nearly every conceivable violation produced a collective 'raped' subjectivity. "2 The standard scholarly interpretation of how slavery affected black manhood is perhaps best captured by the comments of one former slave, Lewis Clarke, who declared that a slave "can't be a man" because he could not protect his female kin from being sexually assaulted by owners and overseers.3 Clark's concern, the rape and sexual assault of black women and girls, has been well documented by the historical record. Thelma Jennings and others have analyzed the literal sexual assault of enslaved women in a range of contexts.4 Physical sexual abuse of women and girls under slavery ranged from acts of punishment to expressions of desire and from forms of forced reproduction to systems of concubinage. Slavery violated the masculinity of black men who were denied the ability to protect vulnerable female dependents. According to Deborah Gray White, "Those who tried to protect their spouses were themselves abused."5 The emasculating psychic toll, White further argued, could have led men to eschew monogamy or resist marriage altogether.6
The rape of Elizabeth Amwood reveals that black manhood under slavery was also violated in other ways that are less easily spoken of (then and now), namely, the sexual...