Today’s Different Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Although a large number of children born into slavery died in their infancy, if they survived, a slave child partook, in bountiful measure for a while, of many of the joys of childhood. One important reason for this was the large size of most slave families. Some of the black autobiographers enjoyed the exquisite pleasure of being the younger child. Sibling rivalry was apparently minimal. Slave parents, in spite of their own sufferings, lavished love on their children. Fathers regaled their children with fascinating stories and songs and won their affections with little gifts. These were all the more important if the father lived on another plantation. The two weekly visits of the father then took on all the aspects of minor celebrations. They were truly this for Elizabeth Keckley, for her father was only allowed to visit his family at Easter and Christmas time. Grandparents, as for all children, loomed large in the life of the slave child. Grandmothers frequently prepared little tidbits for the children, and grandfathers often told them stories about their lives in Africa.
Slave Children
Often assigned as playmates to their young masters, Negro children played in promiscuous equality with white children. Together they roamed the plantation or went hunting, fishing, berry picking, or raiding watermelon and potato patches. Indeed, at first, bondage weighed lightly on the shoulders of the black child. Lunsford Lane, in reflecting on his childhood on a North Carolina plantation, wrote: “I knew no difference between myself and the white children, nor did they seem to know any in turn. Sometime my master would come out and give a biscuit to me and another to one of his white boys, but I did not perceive the difference between us.”
Most of the slaves, of course, did not have such idyllic childhoods. While J. Vance Lewis recalled that his master’s son “was as true a friend as I ever had,” the memories of many slaves were clouded with tales of brutal treatment from their little white playmates who were often spurred on by their masters. Others were cuffed about by the planters and flogged for daring to visit the plantation house. Thomas Jones summed up the experience of many slaves when he declared: “I was born a slave… I was made to feel, in my boyhood’s first experience, that I was inferior and degraded, and that I must pass through life in a dependent and suffering condition.”
Those who were lucky enough to avoid Jones’s experience in early childhood knew what he felt by the time they reached their teens. Many began working irregularly at light tasks before they were ten. After that age they usually started working in the fields. Such labor was the first, and irreparable, break in the childhood equality in black-white relations. Lunsford Lane’s reaction illustrates the impact of this change:
When I began to work, I discovered the difference between myself and my master’s white children. They began to order me about, and were told to do so by my master and mistress… Indeed all things now made me feel, what I had before known only in words, that I was a slave. Deep was this feeling, and it preyed upon my heart like a never dying worm. I saw no prospect that my condition would ever be changed.
Most black children learned vicariously what slavery was long before this point. They were often terrified by the violent punishment meted out to the black men around them. The beginning of Jermain Loguen’s sense of insecurity and brutal awareness of what he was, for example, occurred when he saw a vicious white planter murder a slave and was cautioned to silence by his mother. The shock of seeing their parents flogged was an early reminder to many black children of what slavery was. When young William Wells Brown saw his mother flogged for being late going to the fields he recalled that “the cold chills ran over me, and I wept aloud.” The flogging Charles Ball’s mother received when he was four years old still retained its “painful vividness” to him forty-seven years later.
In the face of all the restrictions, slave parents made every effort humanely possible to shield their children from abuse and teach them how to survive in bondage. One of the most important lessons for the child was learning to hold his tongue around white folks. This was especially true on those plantations where the masters tried to get the children to spy on their parents. Sam Aleckson pointed out hat as a child he “was taught to say nothing,” about the conversations in the quarters. Frequently mothers had to be severe with their children to prevent them from breaking this important rule. Elijah P. Marrs, for example, declared: “Mothers were necessarily compelled to be severe on their children to keep them from talking too much. Many a poor mother has been whipped nearly to death on account of their children telling white children things…”
Culled from: The Slave Community: Plantatino Life in the Antebellum South
Sex Deviant Du Jour!
The Sexual Criminal is a 1949 criminology textbook written by infamous Los Angeles County criminal psychiatrist J. Paul De River that is jam-packed with all the sexism and homophobia common to its era. I thought I’d share some of the case studies with you.
The following case illustrates a brutal sadistic rapist with a fetish for light-haired women. This subject always attacked his victim on moonlit nights.
A young married couple living in an exclusive district reported to the police that, upon returning home late in the evening, they discovered that the screen had been removed from two bedroom windows and the rear door unlocked. As they walked into the kitchen they found their nursemaid, M., age seventeen, had been brutally attacked and was lying on the floor unconscious. Her underclothing had been removed and her outer clothing was up about her waist. The victim was removed to receiving hospital, and after a hasty examination by the physician, it was found that she had received a basal skull fracture and had been forcibly raped. Five days later, the subject F. was interrogated by the police, and he confessed that he had committed the brutal crime as well as several other crimes of similar nature, including a murder.
Case F.
Case Study 105, F. age twenty, white male, a printer by trade. He has had three and one-half years of high school.
Family History: F. was an only child. His father died when the subject was sixteen years of age. His mother is living and well. There is a negative history of insanity, epilepsy and all constitutional diseases.
Past History: His venereal history is negative for syphilis and gonorrhea. He denies the use of alcohol, tobacco, and narcotics. He first stated that his sexual life began about the age of fifteen with the act of sexual intercourse, although he later acknowledged that he began to masturbate at the age of eleven or twelve years. He states that he had numerous affairs with girls during his early sex life, and that at the age of nineteen he married a girl twenty-three years of age. He indulges in sexual practices about two or three times a week, but does not believe he is hypersexual. At times it takes him a very long time to have an orgasm and an emission. He denies all homosexual practices.
His past criminal record reveals that, when he was sixteen years of age, he was sentenced to a reform school for attempted burglary. He served about eleven months and was then paroled. During the course of the interview with the author, F. confessed to several other sadistic rape cases of similar nature, and to a murder.
Somatic Examination: He is well developed and well nourished, of schizothymic physique. He has a good head of thick, dark brown hair. There is a slight amount of hair over his chest and a medium amount of hair under his arms. Pubic hair is of the male type and is medium in quantity. There is a thick growth of hair over his arms, forearms, legs and thighs, anteriorly and posteriorly. His brows are thick and are joined together in the middle, his beard is thick.
He has a male torso. His fingers are long and slender, and his feet are rather long and slender. Muscular relief is good. He is very sinewy. Pelvis and hips are of the male type. His testicles are well developed, penis small (infantile type). On the under surface of the penis, there is a linear scar about two inches long and about one-sixth of an inch in width. This scar is not well defined, and only upon close inspection is it noted. It resembles a scratch which is healing, and it is probably at least five or six days old.
F., himself.
Psychic Examination: He is well orientated as to time, places, dates, and persons. There are no delusions, illusions, or hallucinations. He performs the backward and forward test correctly, and the test for the opposites is fair. He answers questions promptly and intelligently. He states that he knows it was wrong to hit his victims on the head, and he denies getting a thrill from doing so.
F. states that he is very high-tempered at times, although his temperament is phlegmatic. There is a lack of affectivity. He knows right from wrong but does not seem to have much depth of feeling. He states he does not worry. He is emotionally unstable. He is a schizoid personality, cold autistic, professional criminal type with marked sadistic tendencies.
Statements Relative to His Present Offense: F. admits that he slugged and raped the victim, M. He states that the reason he struck the girl was to hide his identity, so that she would not see what he was doing to her or recognize him. He states that he usually uses a 2 x 4 to slug his victims and that he did so in the case of M. He does not think that he is a sexual pervert.
F.’s statement that he uses a 2 x 4 as his instrument of torture when he slugs his victims has great significance. From a psychological standpoint, one must deduce that the 2 x 4, which has always been about two, or two and one-half feet in length, which he usually wields with one hand when striking his victim, unquestionably, whether consciously or subconsciously on his part, is symbolic of the male phallus; and in his wielding the instrument with one hand, one cannot help thinking of the prehistoric or caveman age, when man wielded a club and went out to make a kill. When F. hits his victims, unquestionably he feels that the will to power has been achieved.
Note: Since this examination of F.., the author has been informed through reliable sources that his deductions are correct, because of the fact that his man and his wife do not indulge in a normal sexual relationship. Due to his small sex organ, intercourse has not been successful. He is very sensitive about his sexual development and has an inferiority complex because of this, so the act of cunnilingus has been substituted. Both of them indulged in these acts.
The young victim in the case of F. The victim was struck with a 2 x 4 while being attacked on a college campus.
Analysis and Conclusion: The fact that F. picks out young girls, and the fact that they are always blond and very attractive, leads one to believe that he has a fetish for this particular type. The development and growth of hair is certainly characteristic of the gonadal and adrenal grandular type which is so often indicative of highly-sexed individuals and individuals of sadistic and criminal natures.
F. has developed a shut-in personality (autism) with an inferiority complex, resulting from an organ inferiority. He is an inadequate personality and has made an inadequate sexual partner for his wife, as well as other women. There is no doubt that remarks about the size of his organ by his female partners have caused his feelings to be hurt. Knowing of his inadequacies, he has developed an antagonistic sense towards the female. F. has absolute hatred and antipathy towards females, other than possibly his wife and close relatives. Because of his marked inferiority complex he has developed a supersensitiveness toward things referring to sex. His inferiority complex has swung in an opposite direction to the point of a superiority attitude. With these facts in mind, one cannot help believing that the motivating force behind this man’s criminal tendencies has not been just theft, as he tries to lead one to believe, but sex.
F., while phlegmatic, is not necessarily sullen. He is morally color-blind. He displays no remorse, and apparently never worries. He is fearless, enjoys his strangeness and aloneness. He is not an exhibitionist, but is a cool, collected criminal who has studied other criminals. He belongs to the army of schizoids or psychopathic wanderers who enjoy being alone, wandering about in lonely and strange places at quiet times of the night. He enjoys backyard fences that he can leap, back alleys, hedges, and lonely spots where there is a shrubbery, preferring moonlight nights when he can prowl about without the use of flashlights, and so forth. He is legally sane and a sadistic sexual psychopath.
(This subject was found guilty of first degree murder and executed.)