Wench: A Novel is the 2010 debut novel of American author Dolen Perkins-Valdez. It explores the lives of four young, enslaved women of color, who are mistresses of their wealthy white masters, men of the South, and who spend summers at Tawawa House, a resort in the free state of Ohio. There the women share their reactions to their lives and seeing a free society and free people of color.
Perkins-Valdez said that she was inspired to write the novel after coming across a brief reference to this resort, as part of the history of Wilberforce University, when reading a biography of W. E. B. Du Bois. Among the resort's summer visitors were wealthy white Southern planters with their enslaved mistresses of color, and sometimes their mixed-race children. These interracial couples generally stayed in the cottages rather than the main hotel of the resort, which was used primarily by white visitors. She was intrigued by this little-known history. [1]
After the resort closed in the 1850s, it was purchased as the first campus of Wilberforce College, a historically black college founded in a collaboration between the Cincinnati Conference of the Methodist Church and the AME Church. During the Civil War, the AME Church took over sole ownership and operation of the college. [2] [1]
Lizzie, a young enslaved African-American woman in the 1850s, is taken by her Southern white master Nathan Drayle for summers at Tawawa House in southwestern Ohio, a resort near what were also called Yellow Springs, iron-rich waters. Away from his Tennessee plantation, there she and her master can live as partners, and she believes they love each other. She has borne two of his children, who are mixed-race and considered slaves. His wife has not had any children. Over a few summers, she meets and befriends three other enslaved women of color who are also concubines of white planters. The characters explore different facets of their experiences and relationships with their masters, and the inner life of Drayle is also explored.
These interracial couples and their arrangements scandalized some of the whites in the area, particularly abolitionists. The young enslaved women also see free people of color in the area, and some begin to imagine their own freedom.
Wench earned positive reviews. Samantha Nelson of The A.V. Club said that the debut novel seemed to progress in its sections to express a fuller account of its characters, including Lizzie's master Nathan Drayle, after a reliance on stereotypes about slavery in the opening section. [3]
Lonnie O'Neal Parker of The Washington Post said the novel "raises questions about complex parts of slavery that are less explored for lack of written accounts: What kinds of accommodations and negotiations took place between slaves and masters? What passed for love? The novel looks at what history gets privileged and what gets forgotten." [4]
The novel was selected by NPR in December 2010 as one of best five books published that year and recommended to book clubs, for "something to talk about". [5]
It won the First Novelist Award by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association in 2011. [6]
In 2011, the novel was also chosen as a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for fiction. [7] Its paperback edition, published in 2011, became a New York Times Bestseller. [8]
Wilberforce University is a private historically black university in Wilberforce, Ohio. Affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), it was the first college to be owned and operated by African Americans. Central State University, also in Wilberforce, Ohio, began as a department of Wilberforce University. The college was founded in 1856 to provide classical education and teacher training for black youth. It was named for the English statesman William Wilberforce, who achieved the end of the slave trade in the British Empire.
The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by Europeans during the era.
Austin Steward was an African-American abolitionist and author. He was born a slave in Virginia then moved at age 7 with the Helm household to New York State in 1800. The household settled in the town of Bath, New York, in 1803. He escaped slavery at about age 21, settling in Rochester, New York, and then British North America. His autobiography, Twenty-Two Years a Slave, was published in 1857.
A resort is a self-contained commercial establishment that tries to provide most of a vacationer's wants, such as food, drink, swimming, accommodation, sports, entertainment and shopping, on the premises. A hotel is frequently a central feature of a resort and the term resort may be used for a hotel that provides an array of entertainment and recreational activities. Some resorts are also condominium complexes that are timeshares or owned fractionally or wholly owned condominium. A resort is not always a commercial establishment operated by a single company, but in the late 20th century, that sort of facility became more common.
In the context of the history of slavery in the Americas, free people of color were primarily people of mixed African, European, and Native American descent who were not enslaved. However, the term also applied to people born free who were primarily of black African descent with little mixture. They were a distinct group of free people of color in the French colonies, including Louisiana and in settlements on Caribbean islands, such as Saint-Domingue (Haiti), St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. In these territories and major cities, particularly New Orleans, and those cities held by the Spanish, a substantial third class of primarily mixed-race, free people developed. These colonial societies classified mixed-race people in a variety of ways, generally related to visible features and to the proportion of African ancestry. Racial classifications were numerous in Latin America.
Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States is an 1853 novel by United States author and playwright William Wells Brown about Clotel and her sister, fictional slave daughters of Thomas Jefferson. Brown, who escaped from slavery in 1834 at the age of 20, published the book in London. He was staying after a lecture tour to evade possible recapture due to the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Set in the early nineteenth century, it is considered the first novel published by an African American and is set in the United States. Three additional versions were published through 1867.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of enslaved mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels), as well as the common law of personal property; analogous legislation existed in other civilizations including Medieval Egypt in Africa and Korea in Asia.
Kindred (1979) is a novel by American writer Octavia E. Butler that incorporates time travel and is modeled on slave narratives. Widely popular, it has frequently been chosen as a text by community-wide reading programs and book organizations, and for high school and college courses.
Daniel Alexander Payne was an American bishop, educator, college administrator and author. A major shaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), Payne stressed education and preparation of ministers and introduced more order in the church, becoming its sixth bishop and serving for more than four decades (1852–1893) as well as becoming one of the founders of Wilberforce University in Ohio in 1856. In 1863, the AME Church bought the college and chose Payne to lead it; he became the first African-American president of a college in the United States and served in that position until 1877.
Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was an American seamstress, activist, and writer who lived in Washington, D.C. She was the personal dressmaker and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln. She wrote an autobiography.
Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. was English-born planter, merchant and slave trader who moved as a child with his family to the Province of South Carolina and enjoyed a successful mercantile career. He built four plantations in the Spanish colony of Florida near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. He served on the Florida Territorial Council after Florida was acquired by the United States in 1821. Kingsley Plantation, which he owned and where he lived for 25 years, has been preserved as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, run by the United States National Park Service. Finding his large and complicated family progressively more insecure in Florida, he moved them to a vanished plantation, Mayorasgo de Koka, in what was then Haiti but soon became part of the Dominican Republic.
The Healy family was an Irish-American and African-American family notable for the high achievements of its first generation of children, who were born into slavery in Georgia in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Slave breeding was the practice in slave states of the United States of slave owners systematically forcing slaves to have children to increase their wealth. It included coerced sexual relations between enslaved men and women or girls, forced pregnancies of enslaved women and girls due to forced inter inbreeding with fellow slaves in hopes of producing relatively stronger future slaves. The objective was for slave owners to increase the number of people they enslaved without incurring the cost of purchase, and to fill labor shortages caused by the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade.
Slavery in Virginia began with the capture and enslavement of Native Americans during the early days of the English Colony of Virginia and through the late eighteenth century. They primarily worked in tobacco fields. Africans were first brought to colonial Virginia in 1619, when 20 Africans from present-day Angola arrived in Virginia aboard the ship The White Lion.
In the United States, many U.S. states historically had anti-miscegenation laws which prohibited interracial marriage and, in some states, interracial sexual relations. Some of these laws predated the establishment of the United States, and some dated to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted anti-miscegenation laws, and 25 states had repealed their laws by 1967. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws are unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The treatment of slaves in the United States often included sexual abuse and rape, the denial of education, and punishments like whippings. Families were often split up by the sale of one or more members, usually never to see or hear of each other again.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez is a black American writer, best known for her debut novel Wench: A Novel (2010), which became a bestseller.
The history of sexual slavery in the United States is the history of slavery for the purpose of sexual exploitation as it exists in the United States.
Cassare or calissare was the term applied to the marriage alliances, largely in West Africa, set up between European and African slave traders; the "husband" was European and the wife/concubine African. This was not marriage under Christian auspices, although there might be an African ceremony; there were few clerics in equatorial Africa, and the "wives" could not marry since they had not been baptized. Male monogamy was not expected. As such, concubinage is a more accurate term. The multinational Quaker slave trader and polygamist, Zephaniah Kingsley purchased the Wolof princess, Anna Kingsley, who had earlier been enslaved and sold in Cuba, after being captured in modern-day Senegal.
Tawawa House is an opera written by Zenobia Powell Perry in 1985. It premiered at Central State University in 1987. A fully staged revival took place in 2014 in Modesto, California.
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