SLAVE RESISTANCE PATTERNS

There are two of them . . . Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy . . . They lived in a two-room log house with about a dozen dogs, and they kept the niggers in the manor house. It don’t have any windows now and a child with a hairpin could unlock any lock in it, but every night when the niggers come up from the fields Uncle Buck or Uncle Buddy would drive them into the house and lock the door with a key almost as big as a horse pistol; probably they would still be locking the front door long after the last nigger has escaped out the back. And folks said that Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy knew this and that the niggers knew that they knew it . . .

Most white masters–like William Faulkner’s Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy–knew that slaves were resisting their enslavement. Therefore, slaves had to be controlled, to be managed. White masters created slave dependence upon their owners. The demon of white privilege lodged itself well into the institution of slavery.

A basic step toward successful slave management was to implant in the slaves an identity of personal inferiority. They had to keep their places, to understand that bondage was their natural status. Thus, from the beginning, African-Americans understood that their resistance to white domination was a question of identity survival. Indeed, resistance seemed to be the only way to survive in the face of profound white systemic racism. It was from this root that later separatism ideology sprang.

Slaves were resisting even before they were out of sight of Africa. Resistance became a way of life. Whether it was in the Stono Rebellion or in the Brer Rabbit stories, or everyday work in the cotton fields, African-Americans resisted. Slaves defiantly cut off the roots of the plants with their hoes, just under the round so no one noticed. Slaves used work stoppages, self-injuries, and, especially in the first few weeks of bondage, suicide to resist white enslavement. African-Americans were resisting so vigorously that at times it seemed like a white minority was under siege.

One of the most clever ways the African-Americans resisted the whites was by their maintenance of a very rich culture. This pattern of behavior continued into the twentieth century. Numbers and size of African-American communities affected the degree and nature of resistance, but resistance existed. A chasm grew between whites and African-Americans that politics, religion, and economics would never bridge. This chasm, real or imagined, became an indelible part of the American ethos.

African-American slaves stayed aloof from the white world. This was especially true in their religious life. Many African-American church leaders resisted assimilation into church institutions in which whites participated. It was a fundamental way that African-Americans showed their defiance. In fact, the early civil rights movement to many observers appeared to be a religious protest movement more than a political protest movement.

Brer Rabbit was constantly thrown into the briar patch but he always reminded his master that the briar patch, afterall, was home. But what a price he had to pay! In Toni Morrison’s book The Bluest Eyes the young protagonist–an African-American girl–lamented that “she has no memories to be cherished.” As slavery ended, most African-Americans had precious few good memories to cherish.

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