In many respects, fire ignited the torturous brutalities of plantation slavery. It heated the irons that branded enslaved people, disfiguring their skin and outwardly stripping them of legal personhood. Fire lit the torches of slave hunters chasing fugitives in the rural periphery, and they provided light to the slave traders who conducted nightly raids in the quarters. If an enslaved person failed to build the overseer a satisfactory fire, they could be thrown down, stripped, and given “one hundred and fifty lashes” as a punishment. One man, formerly enslaved in Alabama, was forced to light a fire to prepare a mixture of salt, pepper, and water used to punish a man caught fleeing the plantation. Such mixtures were a sadistic method in “treating” the wounds of the enslaved, as testimonies throughout the diaspora note such a concoction was poured over the backs of enslaved people who acquired their wounds through corporal punishment. As he stood by the fire and watched the mixture boil and churn in the large iron pot, the prospect of such “dreadful torture” was enough to motivate his own escape, as he could not bear to witness the pending violence.
For others, the flames were in closer proximity. Reports surfaced throughout the abolitionist movement that enslaved people were burned alive, and those who survived were forced to live with the physical marks of the slaveholder’s flames. After an unsuccessful escape, one man recounted how an enslaver rubbed his face with tar and lit a match over it: “he put it out before it did me very great injury, but the pain which I endured was most excruciating, nearly all my hair having been burnt off.” It is impossible to know how one might interpret “great injury” in this context, but just as dog bites and lash marks forever reminded victims of slavery’s physical violence, the scars acquired through such burns were doubtlessly etched in the memories of their victims, be they enslaved or free.
Resistance Through Destruction and Rebellion
Though weaponized for both symbolic and physical manifestations of violence, enslaved people used fire and the light it provided for defensive and offensive forms of resistance. Arson provided the most threatening strategy for those who challenged the system. Bereft of projectile weapons designed for maximum damage, enslaved people used arson to destroy the buildings that reflected the slave owner’s material wealth. From Haiti to the US Gulf Coast, revolutions throughout the Black Atlantic held this commonality. Setting fire to a symbol of white supremacy struck at the enslaver’s material wealth, and the smoke emitted from the flames signaled to other rebels that the revolution had commenced.