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intimacy between slaveholders and enslaved women and how the space in the plantation was operated and occupied amongst those inhabitants.
Gendered Exploitation
As the plantation provided slaveholders the advantage of being in close contact with enslaved women often, they were able to supervise the locations of enslaved women in an efficient manner and use the plantation as a site of punishment if enslaved women resisted. Formerly enslaved, Mary Reynolds recalled how“ Aunt Cheyney was jus ' out of bed with a sucklin baby one time and she ran away. Some say that was ' nother baby of massa ' s breedin [...] She don ' t come to the house to nurse her baby, so they misses, her and Old Solomon gits the n ***** r hounds and takes her trial. They gits near her and she grabs a limb and tries to hist herself in a tree, but them dogs tore her naked and et the breasts plumb off her body”. 43 Spaces that were less controlled such as the woods, were still under a substantial amount of control by the enslaver; the hounds were one way in which slaveholders took preventative measures to keep control over enslaved women’ s reproductive capacity and the spaces they occupied. Slaveholders would routinely use the woods on the plantation or grounds nearby the plantation as a site of punishment for their enslaved. Aunt Cheyney was used as an example to the rest of the enslaved women on the plantation about where and the type of punishment that would happen if they decided to run away from their slaveholder’ s gendered exploitation. Especially as Mary Reynolds chose to recollect this event when discussing her experiences of slavery to the interviewer, it is clear that slaveholders used the space and their facilities on the plantation to traumatise and leave lasting impressions on enslaved women to make profits from their reproductive abilities.
Along similar lines, former slave Millie Williams was born upon“ massa Benfords” plantation in Tennessee where her enslaver would regularly use his plantation as a slave market to sell and trade enslaved women for their reproductive abilities. After Williams was“ sold back to massa Benford” he puts her in the“ n ***** yard” which was made up of a“ bunch of shacks throwed together [...] worse than a
43
Mary Reynolds. Federals Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Lewis-Ryles, 243.