On the morning of October 9, 1638, a black woman approached John Josselyn and told him that she was being forced to have sex against her will. Josselyn was a guest of Samuel Maverick, the owner of Noddle Island -- some maps say Noddle's Island -- which is today the largest chunk of East Boston. (It was joined with four other islands using landfill in the mid to late 1800s.)
The woman was a slave owned by Maverick, who wanted her to breed with a male slave. Her refusal to voluntarily take part was ignored and the slave owner ordered the black male to carry out his command.
What happened after that is unknown, as the information above was garnered from a brief passage in an old book, but Yale graduate student Wendy Anne Warren attempts to fill in the story as best she can in an award-winning article titled, "'The Cause of Her Grief': The Rape of a Slave in Early New England." Read more in today's Globe about this scrap of East Boston's history.
No comments:
Post a Comment