Main Narrative » Black Botany: The Nature of Black Experience

The Peacock Flower and Reproductive Resistance

By Rashad Bell, Nuala Caomhanach

Feb 20 2020

“Indians, who are not well treated in their servitude by the Dutch, use it to abort their children so that they will not become slaves like them. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola must be treated benignly otherwise they will produce no children at all in their state of slavery. Nor do they have any. Indeed, they even kill themselves on account of the harsh treatment to which they are ordinarily subject. For they feel that they will be born again with their friends in a free state in their own country, so they instructed me out of their own mouths.” —Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705)

The experience of enslaved Black women using the peacock plant as an abortifacient had been hidden from common understanding of this plant. When in bloom, the eye-catching peacock flower (Caesalpinia pulcherrima) grows up to 9-feet tall, and is hard to overlook. By drinking the seeds, leaves, or flowers of the plant in tea-form, enslaved women could induce a miscarriage.

Under the legal regimes of the antebellum United States and Greater Caribbean¹, enslaved people were considered property, unable to claim ownership over their own bodies. In a political economy that defined enslaved Black people through the language of agriculture and husbandry, plantation owners sought to grow their investment in human bondage through encouraging reproduction within enslaved labor forces. Refusal to reproduce became an illegal and political act.

Plantation physicians listed abortion—along with corporeal cruelty, poor nourishment, and hard labor—among the main causes of ill health and mortality of enslaved women. Colonial and European states, however, were more concerned to increase population than to provide women with knowledge to control their own bodies. Privilege shapes knowledge dissemination and scientific-minded practitioners who worked in the slave system had the authority to elevate (for example, Cinchona used as a malarial treatment) or deemphasize knowledge².  The political and moral economy of slavery made abortifacients seem unnecessary to Europe's expanding drug trade empire. Despite efforts to limit the practice, enslaved women passed on this vital plant knowledge within their own communities. Women’s knowledge of this plant’s abortive properties may be considered as an act of resistance, the desire for reproductive control, or perhaps an attempt to spare their unborn children from bondage³.

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¹ “Caribbean” refers to larger geographical area than the Caribbean archipelago. The “Greater Caribbean” includes the islands and coastal areas from Jamestown, Virginia, to Bahia, Brazil. The historian Peter Hulme coined this term as defined by eighteenth-century Atlantic shipping routes, shared eco-regions, and common patterns of colonization and (eventually) enslavement. (Hulme, Peter. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492– 1797. (London: Methuen, 1986.))

² Cinchona spp. or Quinine—used as a malarial treatment was of vital importance to imperial expansion, plants with abortive properties were not.

³ When discussing slave resistance, contemporary observers and present-day-historians have tended to emphasize male-led armed insurrections. European naturalists independently recorded it as an abortifacient widely used across enslaved women, thus, broadening how resistance is enacted and potentially achieved on micro- and macro-levels  in a violent, exploitative system

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