Some histories are harder to put on a wall than others. The $10,000 bill, titled Exploited, documents one of them: the systematic sexual exploitation of enslaved Black women, and the legal machinery built to permit it. It is the most difficult note in the Black Stacks series to sit with, and that is precisely the point. The women encoded here were rendered invisible by law and by silence. This bill names them.
Here is what it holds.
A note for the sexualized
This is a Federal Reparation Note that will pay to the sexualized on demand, a phrase that refuses euphemism. The bill centers a portrait marked Exploited, the female-focused theme of the note. Where the rest of the series documents labor, land, and law, this one documents the body, and the centuries during which Black women's bodies were treated as property within property.
The law that manufactured it
Two legal references form the spine of the bill, and together they explain how the exploitation was not a failure of the system but a feature of it.
Partus Sequitur Ventrem, written across the note, is the legal doctrine mandating that the children of enslaved mothers inherited the enslaved status of their mothers. It severed the child's status from the father entirely, which meant that any child born of an enslaved woman, including a child fathered by her enslaver, was born enslaved and added to his property.
Colonial Virginia, Series of 1662 dates that doctrine. The 1662 law of hereditary slavery resolved, in the cruelest possible way, the question of what to do with mixed-race children born of sexual relations between white enslavers and enslaved women: it made them property from birth.
A third reference, Series of 1866, marks the bitter milestone when, for the first time, a Black woman was even legally recognized as capable of being raped, because before it, the law held that the crime of rape did not exist between enslaved people, that their relations were simply "promiscuous." There were, in plain terms, no legal sanctions for raping a Black woman.
The number
The figure 58 stands for the estimate that 58 percent of enslaved women aged fifteen to thirty were sexually assaulted by enslavers and other white men. It is the kind of statistic the bill refuses to let you round away.
The women named
The most important work this bill does is restore names that history tried to erase.
Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy were three of the twelve enslaved Black women on whom J. Marion Sims conducted medical experiments between 1845 and 1849, surgeries performed without anesthesia, in the work that earned him the title "father of modern gynecology." The bill names the three he named in his own autobiography, returning their names to the record on his account.
Margaret Garner was an enslaved woman in pre-Civil War America who killed her own daughter rather than see the child returned to slavery, the historical figure whose act would later echo through American literature.
Elizabeth Freeman was one of the first enslaved African Americans to file and win a freedom suit, in Massachusetts.
Sojourner Truth stood in both the abolition and women's rights movements at once, refusing to let either forget Black women.
Harriet Tubman, enslaved and escaped, returned again and again as a conductor of the Underground Railroad to lead others to freedom.
Five women, encoded into a single note, who resisted, sued, escaped, endured, and were experimented upon. The bill insists they belong on currency more than any president.
The symbols and the resistance
The Female Antislavery Seal appears, carrying the abolitionist plea "Am I Not a Woman and a Sister," the women's counterpart to the more famous "Am I Not a Man and a Brother." Encoded too is the cotton root that enslaved women used as a contraceptive, a quiet, dangerous act of bodily autonomy in a system that claimed even that. The mud cloth from Mali runs through the design, the series tradition of grounding each note in the fabric of an exploited African nation.
John Conyers signs as Secretary of the Treasury, author of H.R. 40, the reparations study bill, installed on a note he never got to issue.
Why it works
Exploited is the bill that says the unspeakable part out loud. By naming the doctrine, Partus Sequitur Ventrem, the date, 1662, the statistic, 58 percent, and above all the women, Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, Margaret, it converts a history of erasure into a record of names. It honors them not by softening what happened but by refusing to look away from it.
And because every Black Stacks sale funds direct payments to community members, the piece moves resources toward the descendants of the people it memorializes. It pays, in some small literal way, the debt it documents.
Own the piece
The Exploited $10,000 bill is available in the shop, alongside the full Black Stacks series, each one a decoded document with its own buried history.
[See the Exploited bill in the shop]
Decoded is the journal of Andre Woolery's studio, where the hidden histories inside the work get read out loud.
