So if you put together slavery, patriarchy, and evangelical Christianity, you've got a lot of violence and submission. One thing I found very interesting when I started working on soul murder and slavery is that we have a new literature of trauma that's come out of the Vietnam War. But none of that sees slaves as people who endured trauma. In American history, those people are the perfect victims of trauma, and we can now learn a great deal about what they were likely to feel, or want to do, or try to get away from, or their symptoms, for instance, because we know about what trauma can do to people. Within this plantation household, little kids would be learning lessons.
Little kids learn lessons all the time.
That's how they grow up. And so a white child would learn lessons, as well as black children. I have power too. And so the child, the white child learns that he can give orders and that she can give orders, but not quite in the same way. One of the figures who appears over and over again in fiction and non-fiction about the slaveholding South is the jealous mistress.