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"The Cause of Her Grief": The Rape of a Slave in Early New England
Wendy Anne Warren
... the Second of October, about 9 of the clock in the morning, Mr. Mavericks Negro woman came to my chamber window, and in her own Countrey language and tune sang very loud and shrill, going out to her, she used a great deal of respect toward me, and willingly would have expressed her grief in English; but I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment, whereupon I repaired to my host, to learn of him the cause, and resolved to intreat him in her behalf, for that I understood before, that she had been a Queen in her own Countrey, and observed a very humble and dutiful garb used towards her by another Negro who was her maid. Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a breed of Negroes, and therefore seeing she would not yield by perswasions to company with a Negro young man he had in his house; he commanded him will'd she nill'd she to go to bed to her, which was no sooner done but she kickt him out again, this she took in high disdain beyond her slavery, and this was the cause of her grief.
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| —John Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 1674 |
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| This is a story of a rape of a woman. |
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Indefinite articles saturate that last sentence deliberately. They mean to say: this is not the story, not the only story—not the only story of rape, not the only story of this woman. This is a story of a person whose sole appearance in historical documentation occurs in one paragraph of a seventeenth-century colonial travelogue. Given such paltry evidence, perhaps only indefinite articles capture the indefinite nature of this narrative. |
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The facts are few. The approximate date and location of the assault seem fairly certain: early fall 1638, not far from Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The central characters are equally clear: the slave owner, Samuel Maverick, an English merchant; John Josselyn, an English traveler; two enslaved African women; and an enslaved African man. About the first two, at least, some evidence exists. Their sex, race, class, and literacy combined to ensure that some record of their lives survived their times. As for the other three, no written document other than the paragraph above mentions their existence. We know only what John Josselyn related: when he was a guest in Samuel Maverick's house, he encountered a slave woman anguished because another slave had raped her upon their owner's orders.1 |
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But fortuitous timing, if anything about this story can be called fortuitous, helps. In 1638 very few African slaves lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a general scholarly consensus holds that they had all probably arrived that same year aboard the same ship, the Salem-based Desire.2 The arrival of those first Africans in 1638 was unusual enough to warrant a brief mention in Governor John Winthrop's journal; he noted that a trading voyage to the West Indies had brought back "some cotton and tobacco, and negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tertugos," thus describing the first known slaving voyage to New England.3 Had the woman arrived even ten years later, her journey would have been impossible to trace with any certainty at all, since the Desire was only the first ship to engage in what became a prolific New England slave trade. Instead, the woman's presence among the first Africans in New England makes possible a reconstruction of at least some of her life. |
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