Genealogies of horror: three stories of slave-women, motherhood, and murder in the Americas

ABSTRACT

This article examines three cases of infanticide committed by slave women in the Americas – Margaret Garner (1856) of Ohio, Ignácia (1868) of Paraná, Brazil, and Justina (1878) of Rio de Janeiro. The article argues that each woman sought to dislodge their own as well as their children's place in what I term slavery's ‘genealogy of horror’, making the act of killing their children into an expression of black female agency, love, and insurgence against slavery. The cases of Justina and Ignácia's, I argue, provide a counternarrative to the myth of Brazil's genteel and harmonious slavery, propagated throughout the nineteenth century, by exposing the violence and desperation in which slave women and their progeny lived. In the second half of the article, I examine how cases of infanticide were depicted and used in the nineteenth-century abolitionist poetry of Brazilian poet Castro Alves and noted African American writer Frances Harper.

KEYWORDS:

• Infanticide
• slavery
• Brazil
• poetry
• resistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Roberts (1997, 23).

2 “A Slave Mother Murders Her Child” (1856, 3).

3 The Fugitive Slave Law [of August 1850], and Its Victims. New York: The American Anti Slavery Society, 1861, 53.

4 “Annual Report” (1856).

5 Weisenburger (1998, 48).

6 See note 3.

7 Oliveira (1851).

8 Trial of Ignácia (1868).

9 This Inácia is not the slavewoman from the previous section.

10 Trial of Justina (1878).

11 Painter (2002, 39).

12 Harper (1857, 20). (You need to secure copyright permission to publish the whole poem.)

13 Alves (1942, 274). Translation mine. (Again, you need copyright permission to publish the whole poem.)