Essays and Excerpts

Setting the Table: The Cultural Work of the “House Slave”

Setting the Table: The Culture Work of the “House Slave” 

“I cannot fall asleep again. At the second horn, 

the whip curls across the backs of the laggards— 

sometimes my sister’s voice, unmistaken, among them. 

“Oh! pray,” she cries. “Oh! pray!” Those days 

I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat, 

and as the fields unfold to whiteness, 

and they spill like bees among the fat flowers, 

I weep. It is not yet daylight.” 

— “The House Slave,” Rita Dove, 1980 

“all my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk” 

—Zora Neale Hurston 

“Neoliberalism with a Black face is neither the index of a revolutionary advance nor the end of anti-Blackness" 

—Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White, and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms

In January of 2020, I visited New Orleans, Louisiana to see some of the country’s most iconic plantations and most importantly to listen to the narratives being constructed on plantation tours. Since the 1950s, Louisiana and its elaborate plantations have served as crucial production sites for numerous films in the slavery cinema canon—Django Unchained, The Skeleton Key, Mandingo, and The Beguiled, just to name a few[1]. And though these guided in-person dialogues often lack the cinematics of the “big screen,” these plantation tours serve as a crucial reminder that the violence inflicted on slaves and their descendants persists in the narrative work of storytelling. 

At the Whitney Plantation, as I listened to my white tour guide’s scripted accounts of enslaved life, I found myself asphyxiated by the narrative platitudes that structure the stories told about slaves. At one point in the tour, the guide pivoted his speech to tell the group about a house slave who lived on the plantation. I imagine he thought this story would be a reprieve. As he spoke about the enslaved girl in question, he assured us of her heightened status, remarking upon how she often slept at the foot of the mistress’s bed. Purchased as a pet-companion for the mistress, she was always expected to stay close to her captor. And according to our guide, she lived a “pretty good” life until she was raped by her mistress’s brother. 

As he went on to speak of the child born to this house slave—a boy whose descendants would come to make up members of the city’s black elites— I struggled to find the words to rebut the narrative violence he had perpetrated. What volume of psychic and emotional terror must one disregard to speak the words “pretty good” where the life of a domestic slave is concerned? What is the meaning of the word ‘until,’ when there is no contingency for the slave? What of the gratuitous violence of slavery that did not produce children but bore other unspeakable offspring? What harm is done through these efforts at redemption? Whose redemption are we seeking when we romanticize the slave’s relation to their master? With these questions in mind, I begin this project by stating that this work will not be concerned with notions of “proof” or “evidence” of the house slave’s plunder. Trust and Believe operates on the foundational claim that the (house) slave’s condition is a deadly one, for, both violence and suffering are endemic to slavery. Full stop. 

Rather than scour the archives for anecdotes which either support or rebut the narratives surrounding the “house slave” during chattel slavery, this collection of essays seeks to wrestle with our contemporary attachments to this American narrative configuration. With this inquiry in mind, this project does not set out to “redeem” the “house slave” through traumatic histories that mirror what we think we know about “field slaves.” After all, “redemption,” too, has a history of violence where the slave is concerned. And if I have learned anything from my travels for this project, it is this: there is little that can be said about the “reality” of the “house slave,” that can compete with the narrative enticements of the figure’s alleged esteemed stature. 

Everybody knows a “house slave” when they see one, or so they think. Resurrected as pejorative, the enslaved domestic is somehow always in our mouths, minds, and imaginations. Whether she is cited by crass descendants or sloppy appropriators, the “house slave” insult continues to emerge in our discourse as a historic yet timeless critique. For all the ways this slurred status fails to capture the social death of the enslaved, it has simultaneously served as one of the most enduring criticisms of the “living” and “free.” Wielded in opposition to representation politics, conservatism, and otherwise “uppity” behavior, to call someone a “house slave” is to deploy an insult packed with accusations. For all our narrative exploitation, we remain indebted to this figure and this tradition of criticism for its enduring potency. To this day, so many political imaginations rely heavily on the very truncated plantation narratives that gave birth to the house slave’s second life as a slur. 

Despite our continued investments in this critique of the house slave, little structural and/or systemic analysis has been applied to this conception of betrayal and disloyalty within Black American political discourse. In other words, too many of our engagements with these matters are centered on moral judgments of individual perpetrators rather than assessments of the conditions under which these so-called “disloyal” decisions are made. After all our years of smack talk, it is high time we ask ourselves what it means to judge the slave. For, in the words of literary and critical theorist Stephen Best: “it passes for an unassailable truth that the slave past provides an explanatory prism for understanding the black political present.”

Trust and Believe will analyze the traces of the “house slave” that permeate the “black political present,” as well as the political discourses of non-Black people who cite the slave. Looking to American popular culture and politics of the late aughts and 2010s, this essay collection will consider how and why a rise in popular skepticism has seen an increased reference to political disloyalty, intraracial dissent, and black revolutionary struggle that is still caught up in the legacy of the “house slave.” Paying attention to black, white, Indigenous and non-black “POC” citation of this black domestic trope within and outside of the American political sphere, this project will critique our intra- and inter-national invocations of the “house slave” in and outside of Black American political and artistic discourses. Taking black visual culture and popular culture seriously, this cultural inventory will explore film, TV, music videos, and public controversies where the “house slave” and its narrative tropes are invoked explicitly and implicitly. 

In exploring the complex ways and different contexts in which the “house slave” is used as a form of cultural critique, this collection will attempt to lay out the “culture work” the “house slave” is made to perform as a rhetorical device within black and non-black political narratives. Exploring issues of generational disillusionment, the failures of representation politics, and the U.S.’s contemporary multicultural regimes of anti-Blackness, Trust and Believe sets out to articulate why the “house slave”-as-critique resonates in the wake of the Obama administration and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Considering early arguments for the implementation of ‘identity politics’ made by black feminists like the Combahee River Collective, this project contends with the ways that black feminist theory, and black radical thought more broadly, has been appropriated within neoliberal modes of multiculturalism that do not effectively undermine settler-colonial and anti-black projects of statehood.

Bringing all these voices, criticisms, questions, and stakes to the forefront, Trust and Believe grapples with the critical inheritance of the “house slave” and its enduring power within political discourses and organizing frameworks. Theorizing an idea of “the black indoors” as embodied by the “house slave” configuration, this project will explore the ideas of ‘enclosure’ and ‘interiority’ within black feminist discourses of the afterlife of slavery, anti-relation[4], and the ‘ethics of unforgiveness.’[5] In doing so, this project hopes to articulate how the same may be true for the caricature of the “house slave” that preoccupies so much of our political discourse (in name and allusion), as Hortense Spillers infamously writes of black womanhood in “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book: “I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented”