“She Better Off Dead than Jest Livin’ for the Whip”: Enslaved Women’s Resistance in the Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Nation

As eyewitnesses of such beatings of parents and kin in general, enslaved children regularly observed a range of horrific acts of torture, and they quickly deciphered the meanings of such actions. Their responses to these episodes ranged from compliance to outright insolence. Having witnessed her mother’s treatment at the hands of Ben Johnson, it is possible that Charlotte Johnson White vented her anger about her mother’s death in acts of resistance cloaked as negligence. When she was about twelve years old, she

was tendin’ the master’s children like what dey tell me to do, and den one day somehow I drop one of dem right by where de old master was burning some brush in de yard. ‘What you do that for?’ he yelled, and while I was stoopin’ to pick up de baby he grabbed me and shoved me into de fire! I sent into dat fire head first, but I never know how I got out. See this old drawn, scarred face? Dat’s what I got from de fire, and inside my lips is burned off, and my back is scarred wid lashings dat’ll be wid me when I meet my Jesus!¹

After her mother died, Charlotte Johnson White explained that she “slipped off in de woods to get away and wandered ’round ’til I come to a place folks said was Scullyville [Choctaw Nation] . . .. But de old master track me down and dere I is back at de ol’ farm for more whippin’s.”¹ It is difficult to ascertain whether Charlotte Johnson White accidentally or intentionally dropped one of Ben and Annie Johnson’s children. Since one duty of enslaved children often involved the care of their owners’ children, enslaved children like Charlotte Johnson White recognized that interactions with their owners’ children represented more than child’s play. Indeed, some enslaved children and women entrusted with the care of their young masters and mistresses manipulated their access to these children for destructive and even fatal purposes.

Although White spoke of Ben Johnson’s visceral response to her dropping one of his children, there is no indication of how her mistress Cherokee Annie Johnson responded. Some sense of how her mistress reacted to this “accident” might be gleaned from Annie Johnson’s other interactions with her slaves. As Sarah Wilson explicitly states, Old Master (Ben Johnson) “wasn’t the only hellion neither. Old Mistress [Annie Johnson] just as bad, and she took most of her wrath out hitting us children all the time.” However, she was “afraid of the grown Negroes. Afraid of what they might do while old Master was away, but she beat us children all the time.”² In response to the severe actions of her master and mistress, Charlotte Johnson White might have decided to literally take matters into her own hands by dropping one of their children in to the fire as an act of retribution for past deeds against herself and loved ones.

A great deal of attention has been focused on slave-owning men and their interactions with and control of enslaved people; yet, slave-owning women, like Cherokee Annie Johnson, also benefited from the peculiar institution in the Cherokee Nation, as they did in other slaveholding societies. Due to the particular place of women in the matrilineal-based Cherokee society, Cherokee women owned enslaved people before and after removal to Indian Territory. Indeed, the Cherokee Nation enacted several laws in the nineteenth century to protect the property, including enslaved people, of Cherokee women who had married non-Cherokee men.³ With the creation of a Cherokee republic in the early nineteenth century, women’s authority in the new Cherokee Nation had become truncated, partially due to the emulation of European-American values. Their changing status in the Cherokee Nation affected Cherokee women’s interactions with their slaves. As their position and roles within the Cherokee Nation continued to evolve, Cherokee women recognized that one signifier of their ongoing control and power after removal to Indian Territory rested with the enslaved members of their households. Cherokee women’s power and control over their slaves remained constant and concentrated even as other aspects of their lives altered around them. In the new nation west of the Mississippi, it is hard not to imagine the struggles that transpired between the enslaved and the enslavers in slaveholding households. Where Cherokee women’s authority had diminished due to the changing sociopolitical nature of the Cherokee Nation after removal from their homeland, enslaved people attempted to thwart their masters’ and mistresses’ control over them.

Though enslaved people primarily directed their aggression toward their adult owners, men and women, who were responsible for their state of bondage, others engaged in acts of self-mutilation as a means of publicly declaring ownership of their bodies and countering notions of their inhumanity. Aware of the value of their labor and physical bodies, some enslaved people displayed their refusal to be sold as chattel on the very site that embodied the essence of bondage. In one dramatic case, Cherokee freedwoman Nancy Rogers Bean described her aunt as a “mean, fighting woman. She was to be sold and when the bidding started she grabbed a hatchet, laid her hand on a log and chopped it off. Then she throwed the bleeding hand right in her master’s face.”⁴ Enslaved women, like Nancy Rogers Bean’s aunt, understood how the commodification of their bodies, especially their productive and reproductive capabilities, shaped and secured the socioeconomic structures in the Cherokee Nation and other slaveholding communities. As a result, such actions of self-mutilation, though physically painful for those who committed them, simultaneously hindered the ongoing sale of enslaved people and epitomized their reclamation of their own bodies in Indian Territory.

1. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
2. Rawick, American Slave, vol. 7, 347. [↩]
3. See Perdue, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998) and Fay Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). [↩]
4. Rawick, American Slave, vol. 7, 13. [↩]