ABSTRACT
This chapter revisits the “House of Slaves” with its “Door of No Return” – a popular icon within contemporary Black art and writings – and recovers the forgotten history of the “Maison Pepin,” as kept alive in Senegalese and Francophone cultures while misremembered in African American and other Anglophone cultures of the Diaspora. In revisiting this commemorative site of slavery, I complicate the site for Black women’s historical consciousness since the history of signares – African and mixed-African women who were more empowered than they were victimized by the forces of the transatlantic slave trade as they accumulated wealth and status through their romantic liaisons with European traders – refutes and dislocates the origin story of one of the most victimized moments of African-descended people: that of the Middle Passage journey between Africa and the Americas. Figuratively exploring the “Upstairs, Downstairs” structure of the “House of Slaves,” I juxtapose the signare history with that of the missing history of the women in the transatlantic slave trade – specifically exploring the history of a domestic slave, Venus Johannes.
