“Sukie’s Revenge, an unapologetically intersectional repository by choice”
A Womanist Truth-Telling for Our Time
Sukie was an enslaved Black woman whose story was nothing short of revolutionary.
As quietly as it is kept in American history - and in its present-day iterations - sexual violence against Black enslaved women was not incidental; it was normalized. Their bodies were sites of labor, exploitation, and violation, often without recourse, recognition, or protection.
And yet, within that system, there was resistance.
Sukie’s story comes to us through the memory of another enslaved woman, Fannie Berry, recorded in a 1937 Works Progress Administration (WPA) slave narrative. Berry remembered Sukie as fierce, unyielding—a woman who refused.
“She tole him no,” Berry recounts.
What followed was not submission, but confrontation.
“Den dat black gal got mad. She took an’ punch ole Marsa an’ made him break loose an’ den she gave him a shove an’ push his hindparts down in de hot pot o’ soap… It burnt him near to death… Marsa never did bother slave gals no mo’.”
Sukie did not simply resist—she disrupted.
According to WPA accounts, Sukie was sold after this act of defiance. Yet even on the auction block, she maintained her self-possession. What was intended to break her instead revealed something uncontainable: a refusal to surrender her body, her dignity, or her agency.
Sukie’s resistance was not an anomaly. It was part of a broader, often unrecorded tradition of Black women who fought back, sometimes quietly, sometimes forcefully, against the "violences" imposed upon them. Their resistance functioned as both survival and warning: a declaration that Black women’s bodies were not endlessly available, even within systems designed to make them so.
As scholar Janelle Hobson reminds us:
“We will probably never know the full story behind Sukie’s actions… Maybe she ran. Maybe she didn’t survive. Maybe she lived to see emancipation.”
We may never know how Sukie’s story ends.
But we know this:
Her protest lives.
Sukie teaches us that even within institutionalized systems of domination, Black women have always found ways to reclaim agency, assert boundaries, and disrupt power. Her story is not simply about resistance, but it is about self-definition in the face of erasure.
In a world still shaped by patriarchal white supremacy, Black women’s stories remain necessary, not as artifacts, but as living strategies. And the integrity of those stories is most faithfully held when Black women create the space to tell them.
That is the spirit of Sukie’s Revenge.
Sukie’s Revenge is a womanist truth-telling and resistance writing collective rooted in the legacy of women like Sukie. Comprised of diasporic Black girls and women, this collective exists to confront the ongoing manifestations of patriarchal white supremacy, from systemic injustice to everyday microaggressions and misogyny, through writing, reflection, and shared witness.
We write to remember.
We write to resist.
We write to reclaim.
In honoring Sukie, we are not only telling her story - we are continuing it.
Because when Black women and girls make space for Sukie’s story, and their own, they do more than remember.
They heal.
They liberate.
They refuse the wall.