Motherhood In Corregidora Gayl Jones

According to the dictionary, motherhood is the state or experience of having and raising a child (“Motherhood”). During slavery the children were not born to their mother they were born to the capital; each child that was born meant more wealth to the slave owners. White slave owners were not charged with rape when it regarded a Black female slave because they had no agency over their own body. For a while immigrant women were penalized for having children with black men resulting in the women and children becoming slaves. A child is dependent on his or her mother in order to survive and make bonds with his or her mother; and in both novels the mother was not given the chance to fully do so. Motherhood was challenged in the novels Corregidora
Ursa’s mother states, “He kept asking if he could touch me certain places, and I kept saying yes. And all of a sudden it was like I felt the whole man in me, just felt the whole man in there. I pushed him out…It was like a surprise…I didn’t go see him anymore” (Jones 117-118). Martin raped Ursa’s mother, and the reason she kept Ursa was because she had to continue her lineage and make generations and Ursa was her chance. Jones intentionally let us into Ursa’s mother’s memory letting us know she had to accept the sexual abuse because each girl was living evidence of what her ancestors went through. When fast forwarding to Ursa’s life we she just like her mother, she is taken advantage of and reminded that her vagina is her value. A moment in the novel where we see Ursa be sexual violated is when she is having sex with Tadpole and she is not pleased. Tadpole says to Ursa, “I want to help you, Ursa… Let me get up in your pussy…As long as a woman got a hole, she can fuck” (Jones 82). Jones has the readers visualize sexual abuse from the words of a man who had a sense of power over a woman. Jones also wants us to focus that in no way did she silence the men in Ursa’s life because from her young age she was told inexplicitly that she was born to have children and the men in her life reminded her of that when they remind her that she is only good for sex. The power of words is also shown to us in a novel Kindred by Octavia Butler where Rufus, a slave owner, tells Alice, a slave, and Edana, the main character who repeatedly saves him, that they are one person because all he needs is for them to create children. Raping a black woman was common during this time and it strips her of agency through sexual violence. Butler writes, “I was beginning to realize that he loved the woman - to her misfortune. There was no shame in raping a black