Part of the Family?. Sheila Bapat
to kill several slave owners in order to rescue his wife, Broomhilda, a “house slave” for an evil plantation owner. The film explicitly portrays the physical and sexual abuse Broomhilda is forced to endure as she labors inside the white man’s home.
Consistent with the androcentric nature of many of his films, Tarantino’s primary focus in Django is not on the house slaves, who, historically, were typically female.2 Rather, the women in Tarantino’s story merely support the goals of the macho Django. Artist and writer Remeike Forbes points out that
not only are women marginal in the movie, but the central female character, Django’s wife Broomhilda, is afforded only a few lines. Her key role [is] as the damsel-in-distress, [whom] the hero must rescue from a “circle of fire”.…. Unfortunately, Broomhilda is also the most rebellious female character. The other black women who appear in the film are just the usual fare of fawning house slaves—“as you please, Big Daddy”—or pleasured concubines.3
Even though—or perhaps because—the film is steeped in this gender problem, the treatment of house slaves in 1850s America, as depicted in Django Unchained, is relevant to the treatment of current-day domestic workers. In many ways, the experiences of nineteenth-century house slaves foretold the story of today’s domestic workers, and there remains a connection between pre-emancipation slavery and modern-day human trafficking. The difference is that trafficking victims and other domestic workers are better able to seek justice from abuse or mistreatment at the hands of their employers—because of the domestic workers’ movement.
Domestic Slavery
While some historical accounts indicate that house slaves received less egregious treatment than those who worked in the fields, according to Harriet Jacobs, a nineteenth century writer and house slave from North Carolina, living inside the slave owner’s home was pure hell.4 Jacobs writes how on Sundays her mistress “would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till [dinner] was dished, and then spit in all the kettles and pans…to prevent the cook and her children from eking out their meager fare with the remains of the gravy and other scrapings.” Jacobs goes on to detail how “provisions were weighed out by the pound and ounce, three times a day,” and that her mistress “knew how many biscuits a quart of flour would make, and exactly what size they ought to be.”
Whether a house slave was mistreated or not depended on the whims of the slave owner. And, as with many of today’s immigrant domestic workers, there was no way for a slave to control whether she worked for a gentle master or an abusive one. This uncertainty put house slaves in uniquely vulnerable situations, given the intimacy they shared with the families for whom they worked. Even as they were susceptible to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, house slaves were also responsible for caring for families and running households, serving as personal servants to their masters and mistresses, and producing the food used by everyone on the plantation. They were commonly on call twenty-four hours a day.
Living in the master’s house also meant that house slaves lacked the support and camaraderie of other slaves, which at times made them more susceptible to physical and sexual assault. A physically attractive female house slave could be particularly vulnerable. Harriet Jacobs wrote, “If God has bestowed beauty upon a slave woman, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.”5 In addition, many women slaves—house slaves or not—were forced to bear the children of their masters.6
Other conditions in which nineteenth-century house slaves toiled persist for domestic workers today, particularly those who live with their employers. For example, many household workers are expected to be available 24/7, are supervised closely by their employers as Harriet Jacobs was, and are vulnerable to their employers’ moods. Barbara Ehrenreich describes this intimacy of working inside the home as the key distinction between labor in the domestic and public spheres:
Someone who stocks shelves in a big box store is unlikely to even know the names of anyone higher up in the corporate hierarchy than the store manager, who in turn may know his or her frontline employees only as a “labor cost.” In contrast…most domestic workers are employed directly by the families they serve. They work in their employers’ homes. They may even live in their employers’ homes, perhaps sleeping in one of the children’s rooms.7
In addition to themes of exploitation and abuse, the perception of domestic labor as ancillary or irrelevant to the “productive” economy has also been a feature of care work since America’s earliest days. Early codes regulating indentured servitude in the United States reveal that both slave and nonslave domestic labor were legally deemed to have no economic value. The Virginia House of Burgesses was one of the first elected bodies in the United States to grapple with how the law would codify slavery and indentured servitude based on whether the work took place inside or outside the home.8 In 1643, farmers and business owners were subject to a tithing, or tax, for their black female and male, as well as white male, servants who worked in the fields, and who were therefore seen as producing wealth. By contrast, white women servants did not trigger a tax, because “the law presumed they worked inside the home and were not producing wealth.”9 Domestic work was also viewed, in both the slavery and post-slavery eras, as “nigger’s work” and “women’s work,” a combination that contributed to and exacerbated its lack of economic value. Legal scholars Marci Seville and Hina Shah have written about how “the mammy image—a large, maternal figure with a headscarf and almost always a wide-toothed grin—persists as the most enduring racial caricature of African-American women. The racial disdain for the black servant—‘a despised race to a despised calling’—justified labeling the work as ‘nigger’s work.’”10 Adding another layer to that disdain, domestic work was also considered to be “women’s work” and thus a “‘labor of love’…‘outside the boundary of the world’s economy.’”11
Slavery also reinforced existing racial hierarchies between white and black women. Terri Nilliasca, a legal scholar who also works for the labor union Unite Here, unpacks the particular relationship of black women’s labor to that of white women in the pre-emancipation era:
During slavery, the labor of Black women facilitated the ability of White women to live up to an idealized standard of femininity, one in which a White woman was able to fulfill the gendered division of work without actually getting her hands dirty. In the Southeast United States, it was the enslaved African woman’s labor that enabled the aristocratic White woman’s lifestyle. Thus, true womanhood was defined as “virtuous, pure, and white,” and proper Black womanhood was defined as service to the creation of that White woman ideal. Domestic service was part of the racial caste system, such that no “self-respecting, native- born Southern white woman” would take such a job. Many White women accepted and perpetuated this racist division of labor in order to elevate their status in heteropatriarchy. The creation of the racist stereotype of Mammy is the quintessential embodiment of the ideal of the Black woman in service to the White woman. Mammy gladly raised White children as her own and in sacrifice of her biological Black children.12
In its report, “Home Economics,” the National Domestic Workers Alliance pointed out the racial aspect of domestic labor, namely that female slaves were among the earliest domestic laborers in the United States. Unfortunately, that most domestic work is performed by women who lack full agency over their own lives and bodies is a reality that has not disappeared.
Modern-Day Slavery: Trafficking and Domestic Laborers
In 2006, seventeen-year-old Shanti Gurung moved from her home in India to New York City with her new employer, Neena Malhotra. Shanti left behind her family, friends, and everything she knew for what promised to be a secure job and an exciting opportunity: to live with and work for a privileged Indian family in the United States. Malhotra was an Indian diplomat who lived with her husband in a Manhattan apartment. The couple offered Shanti a verbal employment contract promising her room and board and at least $108 per month in wages, in exchange for “light cooking, light cleaning, and staffing the occasional house party.”13
Much like the experience of Fatima Cortessi, Shanti Gurung’s reality turned