The Queen of Morocco

[wolfinthewood]

Another post for International Blog against Racism Week.

Black Tom may be a kick-ass Cockney hero, but the world he lives in is very much one in which black people like himself are pushed to the margins of society. His ‘Parents had nothing ... but what they begg’d or stole’, and the only training Tom gets is in becoming a thief, like his father. In the last story in the book, Tom meets another black man, who has been a servant, but has lost his job, and ‘has been out of employment a long time, so long that he [has] spent all his Money, and pawn’d most of his Apparel’.

What would become of a black woman who found herself out of a job and unable to find another? We can glimpse the most likely answer in a publication called The Wandering Whore, which was published as an irregular serial in 1660–1661. The Wandering Whore offers (mild) pornography and titillation, under the thin guise of exposing vice. Each issue ends with an ever-expanding list of bawds (madams), ‘Common Whores’ and pimps. In his address to the reader, the publisher claims that his intention was not to encourage ‘Vice and Profaneness’ but ‘to discover the persons’ and warn the unwary against them. However, he conceals his name, which suggests that he does not believe that this piece of hypocrisy is really going to protect him from the law. It is pretty clear that he is expecting to sell copies to men who want some clues on how to find a prostitute.

Several of the names on his lists are those of real people, and I see no reason to doubt that the rest are too. Some of the prostitutes are listed under what seem to be their own real names, but others were using what are clearly professional names: ‘Mrs Cupid’, ‘Green Mall’ (real name Joan Godfrey), ‘Fair Rosamond’ (who had named herself after a tragic heroine from English folk-history) and, memorably, ‘Sugar C—t’. One of the women is listed under the name of ‘Queen of Morocco’. I think we may be certain she was black.* The name she chose to call herself suggests a certain pride and swagger. That’s really all we know.


*In 1624 a list of household servants employed at Knole in Kent included ‘John Morockoe, a Blackamoor’ – Vita Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles.


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