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Writer's pictureMus'ab Yasir Bey

Grandma's Hands Part 1: The Inception of the African-American Matriarchy

"History and law go together like your left and right foot.  When one is missing then you're limping"   - Taj Tarik Bey 

She stood solemnly at the edge of the portico with a chastened look. Becalm, as she watched the man approaching the commodious estate grow larger with every ambling step. Whatever the outcome, she was determined to remain poised, even if the news she awaited, was of ill tidings. He stopped, then smiled. She blithely requited. A faint adumbration of joy began to course though her as he handed her the letter from a court in Virginia bearing salutary news. Rivulets of tears began to run down Elizabeth’s cheeks as she read the letter.


It stated, "Mulatto held to be a slave and appeal taken."    


After nearly two decades of slogging through a maelstrom of appeal processes, her council, William Greenstead, decided to switch venue and the case was accepted and would finally be taken under consideration. An opportunity his client, Elizabeth Key now 25, longed for since she was a child.


It was a bucolic winter day in January of 1656 when the General Court of Virginia decided to remove the manacles of enslavement from the young Elizabeth Key as a bond-laborer by reversing a previous decision made by Northumberland County Courts. John Mottrom, the administrator of the Higginson estate passed away prior to the decision and the overseers of the Mottrom estate, the last possessor of Elizabeth Key, appealed with a failed "far-reaching" defense. A defense that stated, "Key as a lifetime bond-laborer on the grounds that such had been the conditions of her mother.”


This salubrious victory had a pungent reverberating effect on a colony-wide scale, which caused plantation owners to reorganize the flow of the inherited status of bond labor/enslavement.  And it would concomitantly serve as a vector of historical significance that would vouchsafe a particular matrifocal familial arrangement in the African-American community today - being a gynocracy of sorts laid beneath a Euro-American hegemonic structure, lathered in European patriarchy.


"What was involved here was not a mere matter of ancestry, it represented an attack on the patriarchy, though limited, of course, to the Negro family."  - Theodore W. Allen


For the sake of brevity I will attempt to parse out the Elizabeth Key line of ownership, in seriatim, by giving a thumbnail sketch of her transference.  It is imperative for a tactile understanding of the bequeathing quagmire and to offer better texture into the court’s decision as well as the defendant’s eventual written statement.


Elizabeth was born on a plantation around 1631 in Northumberland County Virginia, the product of a mixed union to her father, a wealthy Euro-American named Thomas Key, and an African-American woman he owned. Her mother’s name was never entered into the court records and was never identified as her mother in Key’s personal ledger, nor slave registry.  Despite this, Elizabeth was raised in more privileged conditions than the other servants.  So much so, that in 1636, when Thomas decided to make his way back to his place of birth in Europe permanently he added a few stipulations concerning Elizabeth upon selling his entire plantation to Humphrey Higginson. 


Higginson, also a wealthy Euro-American plantation owner from Key's hometown and a member of the council of Virginia's General Assembly, was Elizabeth’s godfather and accepted the terms.  Thomas Key sold his plantation to Higginson under the rubrics that Elizabeth would be treated in the same respectable manner as she was accustom, be bound to Higginson for a term of 9 years, and then freed.  Key also included, if Higginson decided to return to their hometown in Europe, that he would return Elizabeth back to him at Higginsons’ own expense.  Furthermore, if Higginson died then Elizabeth would be emancipated immediately.   


As fate would have it, both men would pass away before either could again see the peninsula of Europe. Key would transition a few years prior to Higginson's passing, leaving the young Elizabeth to the administrator of the Higginson estate, John Mottrom.  Mottrom was a burgess (official of a municipality or a representative in the House of Commons), as well as a wealthy merchant who owned copious amounts of property including lands along the Wicomico River.  Mottrom would pass in 1655, and in 1656 Elizabeth and Greenstead would bring suit against Mottroms widow, Ursula Bysshe Thompson, now in possession of Mottrom's estate.  In January of 1656, the Virginia General Court agreed with the plaintiff that Elizabeth was certainly entitled to be emancipated under the Common Law principle - 'partus sequitur partem’ - which was a Latin term simply stating that the conditions of the child follows the father.  This decision, coupled with Humphrey Higginson as her godfather, thereby making Elizabeth Key a Christian, and holding to the Christian principle that "all man being created equal," Elizabeth was entitled to her freedom.  Shortly after this decision, George Colclough married the widow, Ursula Bysshe Thompson, and as such now possessing 1/3 of the estate would appeal this decision on March 12, 1656.  Their position was the Common Law principle - 'partus sequitur ventrem’ - which meant Elizabeth should follow the conditions of her enslaved mother.  But, to no avail because on March 20, 1656, a special committee of the General Assembly decided to uphold the decision of Freedmen based on the two aforementioned principles.  


However, it is a matter of analytical importance to understand that when the defendants released Elizabeth,  they released her under the written precept of "feme couvert" or covered woman.  You see, during the case, Elizabeth and her lawyer, Greenstead developed a personal relationship and were wed amid the prolonged struggle.  So as a "fig leaf" or attempt at a form of casuistry to cover-up the embarrassment from the court defeat, the Colclough’s used the legal status and property rights of married women as defined by common law as their justification for freeing Elizabeth.  This status applied to European women who were married, like Ursula Bysshe Thompson, as now being the property of their husband who would consequently absorb the property of their brides.


Though Colclough and Thompson's faux recorded reason for the release Elizabeth was under the guise of property being transferred, 'feme couvert' or covered/veiled lady, the courts decision sent a shockwave through Virginia's slave owning class as a social institution. The die was cast and the Virginia General Assembly of all male Euro-American slaveowners swiftly moved to change the line of inherited status of a child to that of the mother - partus sequitur ventrem - which means the status of the child follows the womb, and to halt baptismal rites as being an entrée into freedom. This change in doctrine of possessorship passed in 1662, was the assured beginning of racialized perpetual slavery with inference that an African-American woman was least likely to have the means of paying her way out of bond-labor, born free, or born of a free mother. Essentially, she was considered the goose that lays the golden eggs in the assembly line of status and inheritance. Therefore, killing any myths of subsequent negro patriarchy because it was a social arrangement that would eventually favor whomever controlled the children in the African-American community. This edict created an odd subculture nestled inside of a broader Euro-American patriarchal society that would burrow through centuries of ill-intented policies geared towards African-American women, since they were the vessels which output the labor.


"And the dragon stood before the woman who was about to give birth, so that when she bore her child he might devour it.” -Revelations 12:4
 

This prurient business ploy of changing the status of an African-American child at birth follows the logic of capitalist thinking.  Shortly after, Bacon's Rebellion would forge the cross-class collaboration of the English slaveholders with the Irish peasants and indentured servants.  So the maneuver of changing the social status of African-American children safeguarded the interest of slavery, while transmuting it into a racialized institution as its concomitant throughout the colonies.   It would also serve as the McMuffin in maintaining a subaltern class order in futurity; a pivotal point of transition in the familial structure of the African-American community as a subculture.  The social consequences of a child inheriting the mothers’ social status rendered the African-American male as fungible as a drill bit by prioritizing the mother as the predominant power in matters of controversy.  Thus began the two centuries of social engineering and the cleaving of the African-American family, in turn neutering African-American men. 


In September of 2022, I published a paper titled 'Did You Hear What They Said' where I touched on 'The First Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question' held in June of 1890 at Lake Mohonk in Ulster County, New York.  A bourgeoisie class of Southern and Northern Quakers, who would be pegged as liberals today, met to discuss social strategies for organizing Indian and African-Americans families.  Rev. Richard H. Allen, D.D., pastor of the Pine Street Church (Third Presbyterian), in Philadelphia from 1867 to 1880, until he was appointed Secretary of the Freedmen's Board, had this to say regarding  industrial labor:


"At Concord, N.C., we have a large boarding school for colored girls.  If you ever save the Negros, you must save the girls and women.  You will not elevate any race until wives and mothers can teach the gospel in their families.  You must save the daughters of the freedmen.  They are to be the wives and homemakers of the future.  At Concord you will see two hundred and thirty-four in seminary, with all appliances and the industrial arts.  They do the whole work of the school  - all the washing, ironing, cooking, scrubbing, and dressmaking.  We take a girl for forty-five dollars a year.  We say to her, Go to work during the vacation and make fifteen or twenty dollars, and we will help you to the balance of the forty-five."


I've stated this before but it bears repetition that African-American men were relegated in America to be a perpetual labor-intensive proletariat class while African-American women were a focal demographic to receive subsidized secondary, and even today, tertiary education.  The men were left to languish just as the biblical pericope states, to be "hewers of wood and drawers of water" in the American imagination; an artificially organized matriarchal structure bent towards neutralizing important conditions of the African-American males’ existence as providers.  Since America’s inception, the African-American family has been a target of local, state, and federal intervention.  This concatenation of events spawned a peculiar tear in the social fabric of African-American relationships as an autonomous institution.  Hence, giving rise to the big business of family court.  Yet another form of what David Harvey calls "accumulation by dispossession."


 

The Elizabeth Key case along with the Mohonk Conference on the Negro Question, advertently and inadvertently adjusted the tuning pegs of the African-American family in this country to that of matrifocal structure. Though less known than the Dred Scott decision, the Key decision was a major contributor of shaping the course of trajectory of African-American existences in this country. Justice Roger B. Taney, in the Dred Scott decision, denied African-American citizenship, and many legal scholars considered that to be a significant contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War to end slavery.  Likewise the Key case, evoked a particular angst, but also caused a thoroughgoing hereditary status adjustment to preserve and protect the institution of slavery. Yet, both were two of the most important slave cases regarding status in America’s history. 


With the Key decisions’ coeval being Leviathan, authored by Thomas Hobbes in 1651, coupled with the Tenures Abolition Act of 1660, that ultimately gave the government power over adjudicating matters of children that favored women -  the social organization of the African-American family's fate was further cemented. Then with the procession of the Women’s Suffrage Movement giving rise to legal principles such as the Tender Years Doctrine and the Custody of Infants Act, which were simply elite Euro-American feminist laboring against their male counterparts for their cut of the colonization spoils through the control of the children, was efficacious. This all played a role in apprehending any scintilla of Negro patriarchy. So contrary to first and second wave feminist theory, America has never had an African-American patriarchy, and there is no evidence that if there were, the arrangement would yield a similar hegemonic character. Studies done by institutions like the Pew Research Center on the progressive political and social attitudes of African-American men have shown the yawning abyss between African-American and Euro-American men's attitudes around family. The denouement to this shift in social status of a child and the social engineering of African-American women to be “head of household” has grown into a catawampus order.


In part two of this piece we'll explore how the advent of feminism led to further balkanization in African-American families, the political paternalism that we see today of African-American women towards men, and policies that ossified this rift between African-American men and women. This artificial matriarchy created a familial dysfunction that has now stabilized into a gynarchy.



 


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