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pig pen”. 44 From the slaveholder’ s instructions, the overseer would be“ watchin” and“ beat” the enslaved women before they were going to be sold or traded. Williams stated enslaved women who had“ lots of children [...] were sold for mo’‘ cause it a sign she a good breeder.” 45 Whilst perimeters and maps of the plantation layout are often documented, poorly constructed houses on a map would not give meaning to how the space was used or whether they were of a temporary or permanent nature; if they were temporary they may not even be documented on maps. First-person narratives such as Milly Williams’ allows the historian to understand how the space was a plantation market, held as a permanent practice which was to monitor enslaved women and make sure that they did not run away from being sold or traded. The use of enslaved narratives uncovers how some slaveholders used their plantation to control enslaved women’ s bodies and derive profit from them.
Conclusion
Through a spatial analysis, this article has used first-person narratives to demonstrate how gendered exploitation was heavily prominent on the plantation because slaveholders organised the space and the mobility of enslaved women on the plantation to maintain economic wealth. Enslaved narratives have demonstrated how slaveholders used the plantation to survey and be familiar with enslaved women, how they challenged resistance and inflicted punishment routinely and how they sold and traded enslaved women from their plantation market for their own economic gain. Firstperson narratives facilitate a social history perspective that would be impossible to excavate in archaeological records of the enslaved and the plantation layout. More broadly, the use of spatial analysis and first-person narratives in this study have provided a more intimate perspective on the relationship, power dynamics, resistance and exploitation held between slaveholders and enslaved women.
44
Millie Williams, Federal Writers’ Project: Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 16, Texas, Sanco-Young, 170.
45
Ibid.