Full citation: Warren, Wendy Anne. “‘The Cause of Her Grief’: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England.” The Journal of American History 93, no. 4 (2007): 1031-49.
. . . the Second of October, about 9 of the clock in the morning, Mr. Mavericks Negro woman came to my chamber window, and in her own Countrey language and tune sang very loud and shrill, going out to her, she used a great deal of respect toward me, and willingly would have expressed her grief in English; but I apprehended it by her countenance and deportment, whereupon I repaired to my host, to learn of him the cause, and resolved to intreat him in her behalf, for that I under stood before, that she had been a Queen in her own Countrey, and observed a very humble and dutiful garb used towards her by another Negro who was her maid. Mr. Maverick was desirous to have a breed of Negroes, and therefore seeing she would not yield by perswasions to company with a Negro young man he had in his house; he commanded him will’d she nill’d she to go to bed to her, which was no sooner done but she kickt him out again, this she took in high disdain beyond her slavery, and this was the cause of her grief.
—John Josselyn, Two Voyages to New England, 1674
This is a story of a rape of a woman.
Indefinite articles saturate that last sentence deliberately. They mean to say: this is not the story, not the only story—not the only story of rape, not the only story of this woman. This is a story of a person whose sole appearance in historical documentation occurs in one paragraph of a seventeenth-century colonial travelogue. Given such paltry evidence, perhaps only indefinite articles capture the indefinite nature of this narrative.
The facts are few. The approximate date and location of the assault seem fairly certain: early fall 1638, not far from Boston, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The central characters are equally clear: the slave owner, Samuel Maverick, an English merchant; John Josselyn, an English traveler; two enslaved African women; and an enslaved African man. About the first two, at least, some evidence exists. Their sex, race, class, and literacy combined to ensure that some record of their lives survived their times. As for the other three, no written document other than the paragraph above mentions their existence. We know only what John Josselyn related: when he was a guest in Samuel Mavericks house, he encountered a slave woman anguished because another slave had raped her upon their owner’s orders.
But fortuitous timing, if anything about this story can be called fortuitous, helps. In 1638 very few African slaves lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a general scholarly consensus holds that they had all probably arrived that same year aboard the same ship, the Salem-based Desire. The arrival of those first Africans in 1638 was unusual enough to warrant a brief mention in Governor John Winthrop’s journal; he noted that a trading voyage to the West Indies had brought back “some cotton and tobacco, and negroes, etc., from thence, and salt from Tertugos,” thus describing the first known slaving voyage to New England. Had the woman arrived even ten years later, her journey would have been impossible to trace with any certainty at all, since the Desire was only the first ship to engage in what became a prolific New England slave trade. Instead, the woman’s presence among the first Africans in New England makes possible a reconstruction of at least some of her life.
It is a life in need of reconstruction. More than one thousand African slaves lived in New England by the end of the seventeenth century, and slave trading was a crucial part of the early modern market that joined Africa, the West Indies, and England (colonies and metropole) to make early New England prosper as the century progressed. But those captured Africans who lived and labored in the region during the seventeenth century have been, as one historian recently noted, “too often overlooked.” A change is certainly afoot: scholars of the colonial North have certainly given attention to the region’s African inhabitants, but they have tended to focus on the eighteenth century. The enslaved Africans of seventeenth-century New England have received almost no sustained attention; the last book to focus exclusively on the subject of Africans in colonial New England was published in 1942 and is now out of print.
Certainly one reason for the relative lack of attention to Africans in early New England is the problematic state of surviving evidence. Recorded references to African slaves in seventeenth-century New England are often little more than a line or two, and multiple entries concerning the same slave are almost entirely lacking. Nameless Africans appear and then disappear in court testimonies, in deeds, in wills, in letters, in inventories, and in diaries; their anonymity makes it very difficult to trace their lives with any certainty. That means stories such as the one Josselyn related have gone largely unexplored; an insistence on quantifiable evidence and on demonstrable change over time, combined with an inherent distrust of sources that report otherwise unrecorded events, has limited what scholars can do with documents about slavery in early New England.
Fortunately, many historians have demonstrated how to read documents against the grain, how to excavate “at the margins of monumental history in order that the ruins of the dismembered past be retrieved.” In this case, at the margins of colonial New England’s monumental history lies the life of an African woman whose presence there can be understood only by envisioning all the regions earliest inhabitants as active participants in the rollicking seventeenth-century Atlantic world. Telling the story of “Mr. Mavericks Negro woman” draws attention to the fact that African slaves and sexual abuse existed alongside Puritan fathers, Indian wars, and town meetings in colonial New England. It also deepens the narrative of early African American history, too long located almost exclusively in the South; this enslaved woman first set foot on North American soil, not in Charleston nor in Jamestown, but in the northern port of Boston. And race relations in early New England become tripartite—red, white, and black—when her story is included, complicating our understanding of early New England’s racial categories. No matter how brutally Native Americans were treated in New England, we have no evidence that any Englishman ever considered forcibly breeding an Indian woman.
One story of one rape opens a view into a larger world of Anglican-Puritan rivalries, of gritty colonial aspirations, of settlement and conquest in the early modern Atlantic world, of race and sexuality and how those two constructs combined to determine the shape of many lives. But there are more compelling and more human reasons to tell this story. This woman’s life deserves to be reconstructed simply because too many factors have conspired to make that reconstruction nearly impossible. Brought against her will to a foreign continent populated by peoples speaking unfamiliar languages, sold as property, raped, and then ignored in the public record, her story mirrors that of millions. Still, her individual resistance touches me; violated but not beaten, she “in her own Countrey language and tune sang very loud and shrill” to a passing stranger and thus ensured her life would be remembered.