Enslaved women preserved their own world and love beneath the master’s gaze

Evidence

Euka, our tall surveyor, instructing where to put our valuables, swing our thick waists, telescope every parrot eye in search of one motion. Headwrapped doula of return, leading back to the land of mother wit, after the mother has been gagged, bound, and pushed overboard again. How to turn ourselves away from their shiny human franchise, their gold portrait coins, interfering with the purlieu of our bearings, who we are and how it is possible, here, even in their savage world, to visit ourselves, levitate our world of before. All this and more can horizontally and without sound still belong to us. We are one line of women, foot and eye-hitched to the celestial zenith, slinking together along the lone rim of the horizon, free of their feral seed, knowing full well they would slaughter us like hogs, had they half a notion that beyond their animal husbandry fuckery, we kept loving each other. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 187

Categorization

• FICTION: A spare prose-poem portrait of enslaved women’s inner world as covert, horizontal, soundless resistance — a strong scene model for fiction about interior life under total power.
• DEFINE: Poetically defines ‘horizontal and without sound’ belonging — interior/communal selfhood preserved apart from, not against, the visible institutions of slavery.
• XREF: connects to: Slave labor displaced woman’s economic role and diverted the master’s tyranny onto her — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 167