Slave breeding In
Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History, Gregory Smithers traces the history of coercive reproductive and sexual practices in the Antebellum South, as well as reactions and denials of the practice of slave breeding by historians throughout the twentieth century. Smithers goes into great detail about
Mandingo, a novel that is explicitly about slave breeding. In the novel, Warren Maxwell, owner of the Falconhurst plantation, reiterates time and again that cotton is not a reliable crop and the real money is in breeding "niggers". Over the course of the novel, four female slaves give birth (and another miscarries), and in each instance the Maxwells give the slaves a dollar and a new dress. The Maxwells, particularly the elder Warren, wax poetic about slave breeding, arguing that while slaves with white (or "human" as the Maxwells put it in the novel) blood are smarter and better looking, purebred Mandingos are among the strongest and most submissive slaves. While Hammond Maxwell is more interested in satisfying his own sexual appetites and preparing his prize slave, Mede, for fights, Warren Maxwell spends much time planning how to mate various slaves to produce the best "suckers". There is much discussion over the virility of male slaves, such as when the cook, Lucretia Borgia, and Warren Maxwell have a discussion about who the father of her baby is: "So that Napoleon boy I give you had a nigger in him after all? A long time comin' out," commented Maxwell. "I reckons I didn't git it from 'Poleon. That squirt no good. This baby is Memnon's, I figures. Masta Ham tole me to try Memnon agin, and I been pesterin' with him fer about a month." Such discussions of intimate details of slave bodies, genitals, and sexuality are rampant throughout the novel, and the reader becomes aware that for a slave at Falconhurst, nothing is private or sacred—not even sexual intimacy. Kyle Onstott's lifelong interest in dog breeding most certainly affected the theme of breeding slaves and slave typologies in
Mandingo. Onstott even comments on this in a
Newsweek article about
Mandingo: "I've always felt that the human race could be regenerated by selective breeding. But
Mandingo isn't the sort of thing I mean."
Sexual relations between white men and black women In
Mandingo, it is expected and assumed that white men will sleep with their own and others' female slaves. In addition to keeping a "bed wench" at home, when Hammond Maxwell travels to various locations, his hosts usually offer a slave to sleep with, along with dinner and a bed. When he visits the Woodfords and meets his future wife, Blanche, Hammond shares a bed with Charles Woodford and is given a slave to have sex with. While Hammond kicks the slave, Sukey, out of bed when he is done with her, he is shocked that Charles and his "bed wench", Katy, have sex—including kissing on the mouth—right next to him. Later, when Charles and Hammond travel to the Coign plantation, the owner, Mr. Wilson, gives Hammond a slave, Ellen, to sleep with. Hammond ends up falling in love and buying Ellen from Wilson. The white men in
Mandingo take for granted their entitlement to sleep with female slaves, and offering a "bed wench" to a (male) guest is part of the code of
southern hospitality. However, there are limits to the actions and feelings that are acceptable between black women and white men. As pointed out above, Hammond is shocked when he sees Charles and Katy kiss on the lips: "It was disgust, bordering upon nausea, that a white man should assume an amatory equality with a Negro wench. It was beneath the dignity of his race—somehow bestial. A wench was an object for a white man's use when he should need her, not a goal of his affections, to be commanded and not to be wheedled." Later, when Hammond is married to Blanche, yet still sleeping with Ellen almost every night, Blanche is upset not because her husband sleeps with female slaves, but because he sleeps with one female slave: "Her husband's philandering with his wenches she would not have resented, but his dalliance with a single wench aroused her ire." Blanche's anger at Hammond and jealousy of Ellen grow throughout the final third of the book until she retaliates by sleeping with the Mandingo slave, Mede. But unlike a white man having sex with a black woman, a white woman voluntarily having sex with a black man is so beyond the parameters of acceptable behavior, it can only be punished by death.
Sexual relations between white women and black men The cultural taboo of white women having sex with black male slaves in
Mandingo is filtered through the mind and experiences of Hammond Maxwell. The issue is not brought up until chapter 35, when Hammond sells a male slave to a German woman. The men Hammond is with understand and are amused by the fact that the woman is obviously buying the slave for sex. Hammond does not realize this at first and when he is made aware of it, his first instinct is denial: "'You gen'lemen wrong,' said Hammond. 'She white, an' ain't no white lady goin' to pester with no nigger buck. You wrong.'" When he comes to accept the obvious, he becomes physically ill: "He lay awake, obsessed and horrified by the fantasy of the German woman in the black man's arms." Hammond's repulsion foreshadows his own fate: his wife sleeping with and bearing the child of his own prize "nigger buck". After Blanche sleeps with Mede, she pierces his ears with the earrings Hammond got for her (of which there was an identical pair for Ellen) as a way to "mark" Mede as hers and also retaliate at Hammond. Hammond sees Mede wearing the earrings as Blanche's silly form of revenge and it amuses him: "...but that there was more to the story never entered his imagination. That his wife, a white woman, should have willing carnal commerce with a Negro...was literally unthinkable, and Hammond did not think it." When the evidence of Blanche's affair comes forth in the form of a black baby, Hammond immediately asks the doctor for poison to kill Blanche. Although he certainly does not announce his intentions, both the doctor and his father know he is going to murder Blanche and neither one stops him because "who could blame the young husband?" The calmness with which Hammond poisons Blanche and then gruesomely murders Mede by boiling him alive in a kettle reveals that, at least in the world of
Mandingo, for a white lady to sleep with a black man was beyond taboo; it was a crime against nature so ghastly that immediate death for both parties was the only possible consequence. "There ain't no other way" explains Hammond to Warren. Tim A. Ryan echoes this statement, writing, "Kyle Onstott's sensationalist
Mandingo (1957) turns the myth of Tara on its head with unashamed vulgarity." And the myth extended beyond literature to real life beliefs about the Antebellum South. Smithers writes that "Two of the most enduring fictions to emerge in Lost Cause mythology were the trope of the chivalrous white southern male and the dutiful (and asexual) white woman." That Onstott so thoroughly skewered these beloved beliefs of those who glamorized the Antebellum South shows how radical a novel
Mandingo was, despite its flaws. ==Critical reactions==