Roots Formed Your Image Of Slavery

Recently, I had the opportunity to buy the movie Mandingo that was originally released in 1975 starring Ken Norton playing the character Mede, a full blooded Mandingo. Apparently, a Mandingo was a prize melanin man to possess and own by slave masters in 1830 Louisiana.

The master of the Falcon Hurst Plantation appeared to literally drool when his son Hammond came from New Orleans with his prize buck, Mede. The old man immediately wanted to have Mede breed Big Pearl another full blooded Mandingo female. Hammond, quickly objected to Mede “getting it on” with Big Pearl since he was actually sexing Big Pearl. The owners of the slaves and the plantation were just having a hella orgy at their leisure. Old Massa even said Lucretia Borgia has had 24 babies. I’m quite sure most, if not all the 24 babies were his.

After watching the movie, it occurred to me that this movie Mandingo, and the television series Roots are the templates of how we, all of us think about slavery. Mandingo and Roots are the images we conjure in our minds when we think of the horrific chattel slavery that took place here in the Americas. We see white men having their way sexually and any other way with the women of the plantation. They were slaves. They were property, to be used like a mule and worse. This could and would often be forcible sex, more specifically rape of the enslaved women, without anyone to report such a violation. Essentially, there was of course an air of fear present since the slave could be, at a whim, sold to another plantation and torn away from their family.

As people, we by nature, adapt to situations or die. Even the most dire of situations. Those that did not die had to accept a harsh way of life, a form of life that forced them into the survival mode of living. Surely, there were instances where the enslaved women would willingly lay down with massa in hope of having a child that may have a chance of a better life by simply being the offspring of the plantation owner. Or, to find favor in the eyes of massa. Never the less the children of these liaisons would have to remain as slaves and property of the plantation owner since she herself was a slave. In turn I am sure there were men that played this same sexual hand

All too often when studying the history of chattel slavery we get the image of a massa sexually raping women they owned, as in massa Hammond’s case. An image of heterosexual white men having their way with black women. But, the Caucasian has not changed that much. The time period was not all that long ago. The Caucasian has a notorious history of homosexuality. We see it in the culture of the Roman and the Greek city states. Then, we should consider the homosexual rape of black men on the plantation. Surely, those coming from Europe, like the proverbial leopard, could not change his sexual spots so easily. And, yet like some women there were surely black men that willingly participated in homosexual sex with their white masters.

Films like Mandingo and Roots do a good job in distorting facts during the slavery period. Plantation life during slavery time was only one facet of the life black people endured. These films have been the template of our images of slavery. None, however, treat us to the images of enslaved people walking freely through cities and towns. Visiting local pubs or hiring themselves out as cheap labor competing against poor whites for skilled labor. None depicts free blacks (and those of mixed black and white parentage) affecting society and the economy. And, certainly neither of these films or any like them are willing to be smudge the white land owner, by portraying their homosexual and deviant, perverse sexual behavior as many of them still retain.