lled and whose cost had no relation to market price. Often a woman for sale was described as a "good breeder". New-born "pickaninnies" had a value purely because at some day their labor would presumably yield more than the cost of their keep. The sex of the child was generally irrelevant as most slave women did the same labor as men. Slave women cut down trees and hauled the logs in leather straps attached to their shoulders. They plowed using mule and ox teams. They dug ditches, spread manure, and piled coarse fodder with their bare hands. They built and cleaned Southern roads, helped construct Southern railroads, and, of course, they picked cotton. In short, slave women were used as badly as men, and were treated by Southern whites as if they were anything but self-respecting women. From the black women who were even partially literate, hundreds of letters exist telling of the atrocities inflicted by "massa." Both physical and sexual assaults on black women were common at the turn of the century. Nothing I have read captures the true devastation to the spirit of the black woman during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Sethe, the main character, is the iron-willed, iron-eyed survivor of slavery at Sweet Home, where one white youth held her down while another sucked out her breast milk and lashed her with cowhide while her husband helplessly watched. Once her owner discovers the location she and her children have escaped to, she takes them to the back-yard barn to murder them and forever keep them free from the unbearable life of slavery. She is discovered after killing her infant daughter and taken to jail. In a heart-wrenching passage, we learn that her reason for committing the infanticide was "that anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were an...
