“What he never understood was why Salina acted outraged and shocked when he finally made love to her. She was pious and romantic and she locked her door most nights against him […] He went back to Hetta.” 

This portrait of the first days of John and Salina’s marriage set the tone for their relationship, but also demonstrates how typical Salina was of many white Southern women who had been raised to see themselves as emblems of femininity. This meant that they were not to enjoy sex but to view it as a marital duty. In contrast, black women were antithetical to feminine propriety and given no right to be modest. White men, like Marse John, often satiated their unfulfilled sexual appetites with their black slaves and were often able to produce more laborers as a result.

“Here you is ain’t dry behind your ears and here you come talking bout how us gwine be free. Does you know how many hundreds and hundreds of years we’s been slaves? Does you know how long since the white man brung us here from Afriky to this here America? You know how come? Well, you know what God told Ham, don’t you? […] Just hewers of wood and drawers of water, that’s what we is. That’s our punishment for being black.” 

Grandpa Tom, who later suffers a brutal death at the hands of the overseer, Grimes, demonstrates how many slaves internalized the false belief that black people were destined to become slaves. He alludes to the biblical Curse of Ham, which was actually imposed upon Canaan for seeing his father, Noah, naked. The supposed Curse of Ham was used to justify slavery and black people’s assimilation into Christianity made it easier to convince them that slavery was valid.