The Pearl and New Orleans

 “The public and shameless sale of beautiful mulatto and quadroon girls has acquired a notoriety, from the incidents following the capture of the Pearl…speech of Honorable Horace Mann, ‘In that company of seventy-six persons, who attempted, in 1848, to escape from the District of Columbia in the schooner Pearl, and whose officers I assisted in defending, there were several young and healthy girls, who had those peculiar attractions of form and feature which connoisseurs prize so highly. Elizabeth Russel was one of them. She immediately fell into the slave-trader’s fangs, and was doomed for the New Orleans market’ “(Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,619-620).                                

  “The Pearl,” is the name of a sixty-five foot Chesapeake Bay schooner that played a significant role in the transportation of enslaved people to safe harbors from Washington, D.C. In 1848, the Pearl was chartered by free African Americans for $100 to help 77 people escape the opppression, degradation, and shackles of slavery. This heroic, yet, risky, journey has been documented and is one of the most upsetting stories of the underground path to freedom. Unfortunatley, the free and enslaved passengers were ultimately captured in the Chesapeake Bay and returned to D.C.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         When it comes down to New Orleans, Louisiana, as well as other southern states and the fair-skinned or lighter complexioned slaves, in particular the women, it can be safe to assume that these women were sold to the “market” for prostitution. Dr. David Pilgrim, Professor of Sociology at Ferris State University, wrote an essay titled: Jezebel Stereotype , an essay from information he gathered from other people’s research on the portrayal of African American women in America from slavery, up until present day. In this essay, there is research done by a contemporary sociologist, K.Sue Jewell, whose conceptualization is based on a kernel of historical truth. Jewell says that during the slavery-era, many mulatto’s were sold into prostitution, as well as the free-born light-skinned women. These women became the willing concubines of wealthy, white, southern men. This system is called placage, which is a formal arrangement for the white suitor/customer to financially support the black woman and her children in exchange for long-term sexual services. Moreover, in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the chapter titled: The Quadroon’s Story, the character Cassy, tells Tom her life story about how she was a daughter of a slave (mother) and slave owner (father) in New Orleans, and when her father died, she was introduced by a lawyer to a young, handsome man who , “had paid two thousand dollars for me, and I was his property…He put me into a beautiful house with servants, horses, and carriages, and furniture, and dresses…I did want him to marry me…But he convinced me that it would be impossible,” (516-517).

     Ultimately, Cassy wounded up with Legree, as well as Emmeline, who was also picked by Legree because of her distinctive looks to satisfy him sexually. Then there was Eliza, also a fair-skinned slave, whose appearance infactuated the trader, Haley. Haley told Mr. Shelby, “You might make your fortune on that ar gal in Orleans, any day. I’ve seen over a thousand, in my day, paid down for gals not a bit handsomer” (45). These unfortunate tales in this story was Stowe’s way of condemning the slave-owners without being too overt, especially about the treatment of lighter-skinned slave women. She always made refernces to selling the women to New Orleans, but never actually made it out to be for prostitution, or placage.

     Jewell, also noted that, “it is a mistake to assume that only, or even mainly, fair-complexioned Black women were sexually objectified by the larger American society. From the early 1630’s to the present, Black American women of all shades have been portrayed as hypersexual ‘bad-black girls’ “. Pilgrim, notes that Black women stereotypes were that they were lascivious by nature; seductive, alluring, beguiling, tempting, and lewd. Meanwhile, White women were known as models of self-respect, self-control, modesty, and sexual purity. Perhaps, that is why the wealthy, white men preferred the “quadroon or light-complexioned women”, because they were good for “passing”, but since they had black-blood in them, they were only good for the reputations black women were stigmatized with.

Works Cited

Stowe, Harriet Beecher,Uncle Tom’s Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly.

  (New York: Penguin Group, 1981), 7-629

http://www.southernexposuresbycarol.com

http://www.pearlcoalition.org/

www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/jezebel/