Gender at Oxmoor
A staple of plantation slavery was the use of Black women’s labor inside the home, as seamstresses, planters, and cooks, and as wetnurses.
Wetnursing at Oxmoor
Sabra, Becky, and Louisiana are described throughout this collection attending to the descendants of Alexander Scott Bullitt through cooking, nursing, and changing them from infancy.
In this letter from 1842, Mildred Ann Bullitt writes that James has been “weaned” off of Sabra, meaning that James has grown out of needing breastmilk. In another letter from 1847, Mildred Ann Bullitt writes that Sabra has just had a child, and Louisa is still nursing her son, Smith.
At the time of writing, there are only two known photographs of enslaved people at Oxmoor. Both photographs are of enslaved women, who hold white children that they were forced to nurse. In these instances, the only photographs we have been able to preserve of enslaved persons at Oxmoor weren't meant to feature them. These photographs were intended to picture the white children they were forced to care for, with the Black women raising them seen as mere props to keep them still for a photo. Researchers should read against these intentions and instead use these items to investigate the perspectives and agency of enslaved people.
The Life of Louisiana Taylor
Louisiana Taylor was born around the same time as the Louisiana Purchase (hence her name), but the exact date is unknown. Louisiana was apparently five days old when she was “gifted” to Mildred Ann Fry - who would later become Mildred Ann Bullitt, as a birthday present. Louisiana, also known as Louisa, was constantly referred to by her enslavers as “Teush” or “grandmammy.” This photograph of her and an infant Helen Stites, a descendent of the Bullitts, was taken around 1879. Louisiana would have been about 70 years old at the time. Furthermore, the back of the photograph says that her father was of Indigenous descent, but there are no other testimonies to confirm this.
Louisiana was a matriarch in many ways, and it is through her that researchers can discern the genealogy of several families that were enslaved by the Bullitts. Though exact biological connections are unclear, the role of “mammy” was a generational placeholder; as Louisiana was “grandmammy,” her daughter could have been “mammy.” Louisiana had at least one daughter, possibly Beck, and this may be the women pictured in the tintype below:
This tintype has no clear date, and neither of the figures pictured can be identified at present. Tintype photographs were most popular in the 1860s and 1870s, so this photograph was taken around the Civil War or Early Reconstruction eras.
The cloth label that accompanies the photograph writes “Mammie” on one side, and “One of Tom Bullitt’s,” on the other. It is unclear if this label refers to the Black woman as “one of Tom Bullitt’s” or the white child she holds. The name scribbled above this caption could be read as Petsy, Betsy, Patsy, Becky, among others.