The Delectable Negro

Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Dwight McBride, Justin A Joyce, E. Patrick Johnson

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479849260
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation

Scholarsof US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations thatBlack Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslavedperson’s claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literalstarvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of theslaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacksexperienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. TheDelectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism,cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literatureand US slave culture.

Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, suchas the slave narratives of OlaudahEquiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other lesscirculated materials like James L. Smith’s slave narrative, runaway slaveadvertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in thenineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, politicalaspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both Europeanand white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh.Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only againstsocial consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation andhunger designed to break them. He concludes with an examination of thecontroversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of thetwenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which todescribe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.

1
Cannibalism in Transatlantic Context

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Europeans did not understand the extent to which western and central Africans regarded them as cannibals and flesh harvesters. In an 1849 exchange between Augustino (an African-born slave) and the Select Committee of the House of Lords, Appointed to Consider the Best Means which Great Britain Can Adopt for the Final Extinction of the African Slave Trade, British interrogators questioned the African man regarding his belief in European cannibalism. British interrogators “could not understand what had put the idea into the slaves’ heads that they were to be eaten. ‘Are they eaten in their own country?’ asked the British interrogator, as ignorant and suspicious of Africa as the new slaves were of the white world.”¹ In an expected rhetorical maneuver, the interrogator places the onus of proof and explanation on the African man, Augustino. The British man is willing to believe that African cultural practices lend themselves to cannibalism, whereas he presumes that “civilized” European legislative processes, mechanisms of reason, and critical inquiry rise above such a cannibal accusation.

Had Augustino truly received the opportunity and felt compelled to explain the particular constellation of beliefs, social practices, human science, and perceptions informing the African’s belief in white cannibals, members of the Select Committee would have learned more that day than they probably wanted to know about African notions of Christian cannibalism, slavery as a process of human consumption, and sex and the consumptive appetites of whites from an African perspective. The British interrogator asks the African man to speak, to testify before this legislative body but then renders his voice and perceptual reality (what he might have said about white cannibalism) unspeakable. Rather than inquiring into exactly what Africans meant by eating and flesh consumption, Europeans and white Americans habitually applied to African persons and cultural practices generic theories of social ineptitude and cannibalistic hunger. For example, in 1839, American media proliferated with images of the Mende persons who had taken over the slave ship Amistad. A number of the Mende men had “pointy filed teeth” and emerged from the slave ship onto American shores wearing no clothing. According to Patricia A. Turner, white Americans equated the African men’s pointed teeth and their nakedness with cannibalism: “This was an appalling and disturbing lack of modesty as far as white Americans were concerned. In their minds, it made sense that people who were ambivalent about clothing would be the kind to eat human flesh.”² The Mende, though, had their own ideas about Europeans as cannibals. It was the fear of cannibalistic Europeans that inspired the Mende men to revolt, seize the slave ship, and attempt to sail the vessel back to Sierra Leone.

Firmly wedded to rigid notions of their own civility, Europeans have, for the most part, presumed themselves beyond accusations of cannibalism. As we see with the British interrogator, the belief in European supremacy determines the direction and outcome of the exchange; from the outset, the British interrogator interprets any insight Augustino would bring to the topic of Europeans as cannibals as evidence of African cannibalistic ways. In the context of hearings focused on the African person and on ending the slave trade, the last thing British magistrates wanted to discuss was the topic of an emerging European cannibal. They wanted to end the slave trade, absolve their nation of moral taint, and return the Africans to their original status of savagery, unless the civilizing efforts of missionaries and other such persons sent to reform the continent of Africa intervened.

Taking my cue from this exchange between the British official and Augustino, I explore in this chapter the correlation between the consumptive appetites of whites and the transatlantic slave trade. It is my contention that somewhere between European denial and African accusation a new species of civilized “white cannibal” was born. This white cannibal was unique to the Middle Passage and transatlantic slavery. In addition to literal acts of eating, carving, and cooking flesh, European and American whites developed a culture of cannibalism wherein daily acts of violence, religious conversion, slave seasoning and breaking, and sexual brutality all fed into the master’s appetite for African flesh and souls. Many historical texts on the subject of slavery describe the importance of the process of “seasoning” for breaking men and women and making them into docile “slaves.” Elaborating on the culinary connotations of the word “seasoning” (season: “to heighten or improve the flavor of food by adding condiments, spices, herbs, or the like”),³ I link the physically brutal culture of seasoning to the parallel development of erotic appetites, tastes, and aesthetic longings for the black male. This broader understanding of seasoning is important, as it helps explain how institutional processes, such as Christian indoctrination, male fraternal love and bonding, and the acquisition of literacy facilitated the social consumption of the Negro and the creation of a high cultural premium upon African flesh.

The textual focus of this chapter is Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. We recognize Equiano’s text as a staple among transatlantic slave narratives. It was the first to document extensively the experiences and travails of an African (Ibo) child sold into slavery and shuttled among English, U.S., and Caribbean slave owners. What is still little acknowledged among scholars of Equiano’s narrative is how his text documents at length the process of the slave’s social consumption, focusing on culinary rituals, processes of flesh seasoning, and the hunger and appetites whites developed for blacks in the context of slave culture. Equiano’s text is a useful touchstone for beginning this book-length discussion of homoeroticism and human consumption, as it brings together this culture of consumption with male fraternity and homoeroticism. Equiano’s social consumption always happens in the context of intimate, homoerotic relations, a fact suggesting that intimacy and connection rather than abjection and disconnection might have best facilitated the slave’s social consumption.

For the most part, our scholarly responses to African accusations of cannibalism have failed to penetrate the surface. This is the case even as the accusations against Europeans proliferate, arising from local patterns of thought and belief about cannibalism. Generally speaking, Africans taken by force from their home communities feared Europeans, whom they frequently thought of as “ministers of destruction,” “magicians,” and “flesh eaters.” Ottobah Cuguano, a West African captured by English slave traders and taken to England, recalled the first time he saw whites: “We came to a town, where I saw several white people, which made me afraid that they would eat me, according to our notion as children in the inland parts of the country.”⁴ Joseph Wright of the Egba people of Nigeria fell into a deep depression when his kinsmen sold him as a slave to the Portuguese. At the root of his depression was the common belief “that the Portuguese were going to eat us when we got to their country.”⁵ Even worse by way of reputation than the Portuguese were the English, whom some African groups understood to be an even more vicious species of cannibal. After their capture by the Portuguese, Wright and his kinsmen come the next day upon an English man-of-war. He fully believes the Portuguese when they describe the English as the “real” species of cannibal: “They [the Portuguese] … told us that these were the people which would eat us, if we suffered them to prize us.”⁶

Scholars of the transatlantic slave trade and the black experience have tended either to metaphorize or dismiss such examples as superstitious thought or unfounded indigenous terrors. Scholarship on the life of Ota Benga, a pygmy man brought to the United States in the late nineteenth century and displayed as an attraction in a zoo, exhibits these tendencies. Benga is described by his biographer as believing that “White Eyes” (white men) are cannibals, a fear ascribed mostly to superstition Benga and the equally “savage” Apache chieftain, Geronimo, shared. Benga, who is portrayed as prone to childish “pranks” and witchcraft, and his pygmy-based cannibal beliefs are thought to have no critical bearing upon the structures of U.S. imperialism and exotic consumerism.⁷ Mia Bay situates African beliefs that Europeans were cannibals in a historical context that ultimately reinforces Western conceptions of reality and overlooks the social logic and human science behind African cannibal beliefs. She attributes such beliefs to “traditional African tribal animosities that placed the imputation of cannibalism on distrusted foreign peoples” and to the fact that “Africans taken by the Europeans [in the context of slavery] were usually never seen again.”⁸ Bay concludes that “African misapprehensions about white cannibalism” were not real. Rather, she finds them to be based in a distorted historical vision, a viewpoint easily corrected with “facts.”⁹ In “White Cannibals, Black Martyrs: Fear, Depression and Religious Faith as Causes of Suicide among New Slaves,” William D. Piersen draws conclusions similar to those asserted by Bay. He also attributes African “misapprehension of white cannibalism” to several culturally limiting and determined factors. These include the fact that kin and kinsmen who were taken in the slave trade were never heard from again, coastal Africans’ mistrust of foreign peoples, and the widespread belief among differing African groups that the more suspect tribes, such as the Ibo, Coromantees, Angolans, and Ibibios, were cannibals.¹⁰ Such logic, while meant to be corrective, has ultimately reinforced the idea of the African as superstitious and lacking a civilized perspective on the world and humankind. Furthermore, such thinking presumes a historical trajectory in which beliefs and practices related to cannibalism are “pre-civilization,” with civilization being characteristically European and associated with Western advancement.

We are not in the habit of thinking about slavery and consumption as coterminous realities. It seems such an unreal occurrence to those who know very little of the global history of slavery and human consumption. Carl O. Williams, extrapolating from observations of ancient Icelandic slavery, describes the slave master as the ultimate human parasite, one whose fundamental relationship to the slave is that of a consumer to a food source or commodity. He writes:

This class of the lowly is the source from which the master class draws its livelihood and leisure. Thraldom [slavery] is a degree of cannibalism. It is a system of man feeding upon man. The master is a human parasite, who, by the right of might, has secured his fellow-men in the bonds of thraldom in order to feed upon them and to use them for the satisfaction of his appetites.¹¹

According to Orlando Patterson, sexual desire and codes of masculine honor strongly informed this culture of human consumption described by Williams: “What the slave mainly fed was the master’s sense of honor and his sexual appetite.”¹² After methodically butchering and cooking a male slave over a roiling open fire, one Kentucky slave master reported to his wife “that he had never enjoyed himself so well at a ball as he had enjoyed himself that evening.”¹³ Such incidents proliferated throughout the slave-trading diaspora (especially in the Caribbean and the Americas), where carving, cooking, and eating of flesh served as punishments and conditioning rituals. Typically, masters derived feelings of pleasure and social empowerment from rituals of torture and consumption. Patterson, concurring with Williams and drawing upon analyses of slavery among “primitive Germanic peoples,” observed also that slaves were “socially consumed” and that this process of consumption was endemic to “all other slave holding societies,” both before and after European global expansion.¹⁴

Importantly, both Williams and Patterson foreground the erotic and, more specifically, the homoerotic desires of masters that shaped and informed master/slave relations. Masters received a sexual high or erotic charge from consumptive acts. Power and sex intertwined, with the slave’s body and sex serving not only the purposes of pleasure and erotic fulfillment but also reinforcing the master’s authority, supremacy, and dominance.

Romancing the Cannibal

Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa is today regarded as an exemplary specimen of African civilization and cultural production. Equiano is not the silenced and culturally determined Augustino, who speaks but is not heard. Instead, Equiano, an African-born, formerly enslaved man, managed to achieve literacy and pen his narrative, which is not only a vindication of his Ibo people, but a model of literature in the genres of the travel, slave, and exploratory narrative. While little substantive scholarship has been written on the topic, Equiano’s text remains one of our most thorough and elucidative explorations of the European acting as a type of cannibal in the transatlantic context. In his travel narrative, Equiano describes a culture of cannibalism based in practices of cutting, harvesting, and cooking flesh. In keeping with Patterson’s assertion, a homoerotic sexual appetite facilitates the African’s social consumption in Equiano’s narrative: Homoerotic desire serves as a means of tasting, ingesting, and cultivating an institutionalized appetite for African flesh. Furthermore, in Equiano’s narrative, the institutions of Christian fraternity, chivalric homoerotic love, transatlantic mercantilism, and literacy all serve as means through which European and American white males cultivate high cultural tastes for African males and perpetuate metaphoric and erotic rituals of consumption.

Scholars of Equiano’s life and work have categorized and studied The Interesting Narrative as a slave narrative, a travel narrative, and an autobiography. Though it fits into all of these categories, I approach the text primarily as a slave narrative. When Equiano penned his narrative, British abolitionist efforts were well under way. The interview between Augustino and representatives of the British Select Committee reflected the British government’s determination to throw its full legislative powers behind the ending of the African slave trade. In the prefatory material to the narrative, Equiano includes a letter that he wrote to the British Parliament. The letter begins: “Permit me with the greatest deference and respect, to lay at your feet the following genuine Narrative; The chief design of which is to excite in your august assemblies a sense of compassion for the miseries which the Slave Trade has entailed on my unfortunate countrymen.”¹⁵ Equiano wrote with the intention of locating himself and his narrative within this national abolitionist conversation.¹⁶

Equiano’s abolitionist sentiments and finely attuned awareness of English feelings of cultural superiority distinguished his text from narratives written by his peers. It is the perfect text for initiating a discussion of black male consumption in a transatlantic context, as it is “the prototype of the slave narrative” and prefigures representations of white cannibalism in the slave narratives published by black American men in the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Henry Louis Gates Jr. has described Equiano’s narrative as the “silent second text” of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.¹⁸ Following a marketing strategy established by Equiano, Douglass distributed his slave narrative on both sides of the Atlantic and received acclaim in U.S. and British abolitionist circles.

Equiano’s narrative, like none written before or after, provides an early snapshot of black experience and identity as transatlantic. It is the story of a West African child sold into slavery, bartered among white masters, and raised aboard schooners that traverse the Atlantic carrying slaves and cargo from England to the Caribbean and then to the United States. Equiano begins his narrative as an isolated and traumatized child whose overwhelming response to slave captors is fear and terror. He fears he will be eaten. He fears the whites are cannibals. Equiano first raises his concern that the whites are cannibals after British slavers purchase him and take him aboard the slave ship African Snow. Secretly, the African youth questions his bonded kinsmen about the whites: “I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair.”¹⁹

The first section of his narrative documents his constant preoccupation with cannibalistic Europeans. His initial observations are only confirmed by visions of boilers and African bodies chained together, presumably waiting to be fed to the boilers: “When I looked round the ship too, and saw a large furnace or copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor’s Note
• Foreword
• Introduction: “Master … eated me when I was meat”
• 1. Cannibalism in Transatlantic Context
• 2. Sex, Honor, and Human Consumption
• 3. A Tale of Hunger Retold: Ravishment and Hunger in F. Douglass’s Life and Writing
• 4. Domestic Rituals of Consumption
• 5. Eating Nat Turner
• 6. The Hungry Nigger
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• About the Editors