They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South

by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers

White southerners developed a special terminology to describe enslaved people’s emotions, terms and phrases intended to render their pain, grief, trauma, and emotional loss invisible. The literary scholar Anne Anlin Cheng identifies a discourse common to both scholars and laypeople in discussions of race that views marginalized people’s expressions of grief as pathological, while simultaneously defining white people’s expressions of grief as healthy. Nineteenth-century white southerners employed their own version of this.78 When confronted with enslaved women’s emotional responses to losing or being separated from their children, white southerners construed their grief as “the sulks,” or even a form of madness—“vices,” flaws, or pathological conditions—that made such women less valuable and less desirable in the slave market.