Shout out to Phillis, who cooked up some shit in the kitchen and slipped poison into the world of her enslaver John Codman in 1755.

Shout out to the women whose names flicker through dusty court ledgers: Jenny. Kate. Rose. Dinah. Sally. These enslaved women were dragged into Virginia courtrooms in the mid-1700s, accused of poisoning, beating, stabbing, killing the people who claimed to own their breath. The records are thin. Sometimes only a first name survives. But even that is enough to tell us that they were not as obedient as the mythology requires.

Shout out to Judah, an enslaved 14-year-old from Maryland who tried to burn down her enslaver’s house and killed three of his children by 1834. The records describe it as monstrous. But between the lines sits another possibility: a teenager staring down the machinery of slavery and refusing to help raise the next generation of people who would inherit the whip.

Shout out to Celia, 14 years old when she finally decided that her body was not a plantation. On the night of June 23, 1855, after years of sexual violence, Celia murdered her enslaver/rapist Robert Newsom.

Shout out to the unnamed women and girls who moved through rebellion like wind through tall grass during Gabriel’s Rebellion, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, and the Stono Rebellion. They carried carried messages, hid weapons, fed insurgents, and sometimes struck directly at the architecture of slavery itself.

Their resistance did not always look like marching armies or battlefield glory. Sometimes it looked like a kitchen. Or a nursery. Sometimes it looked like a cabin in the dark. Sometimes it looked like a girl barely old enough to be called a woman deciding that tonight would be the last night someone climbed on top of her. Reading their stories can feel tantalizing, even electric.

Their rebellion was quiet, domestic, intimate. And for enslavers, that intimacy was the most terrifying thing of all. Because the system depended on the lie that the people it brutalized would remain gentle, loyal, grateful.

It's Women's History Month, 2026.
By Stacey Patton - Friday, March 6, 2026