The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. By Wilma A. Dunaway (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2003) 368 pp. $80.00 cloth $28.00 paper
Black troops and their families suffered from several kinds of violence inflicted on them alone. The rebels had a habit of killing black troops after they had surrendered or been captured. Yet, black troops continued to join the army and support the Union cause in spite of this risk; they fought harder in combat. In addition African-American family members in the North faced violence themselves at home. But, in their case, their assailants were white northerners, such as in the 1863 race riots in Detroit on March 6th and the three-day riots in New York City on July 13th–16th. Blacks were killed and wounded in both riots, and their property was destroyed. Even with the threat of violence against them in the North as well as the South, northern blacks continued to enlist and support the Union war effort. African Americans remained loyal to the Union and to the cause.
Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), offers a literary account of an African American family in dire poverty struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on the outskirts of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. This article focuses on the novel’s ‘ideology of form’, which is premised on biblical models of narration —grounded on a literary transposition of The Book of Deuteronomy— that serves to portray the victimization of African Americans in mythical tones to evoke the country’s failed covenant between God and his chosen people. It also brings into focus the affective bonds of unity and communal healing relying on the idiosyncratic tenet of home understood as national space— following Winthrop’s foundational ideology. As I will argue, the novel contends that the revamped concept of communal home and familial bonds —echoing Winthrop’s emblem of national belonging— recasts the trope of biblical refuge as a potential tenet to foster selfassertion and to rethink the limits of belonging and acceptance.
Dunaway, Wilma A. Slavery in the American Mountain South. [Studies in modern capitalism.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2002. 364 pp. £50.00. (Paper: £18.99.) Dunaway, Wilma A. The African-American family in Slavery and Emancipation. [Studies in modern capitalism.] Cambridge University Press, Cambridge [etc.] 2003. xi, 368 pp. £55.00. (Paper: £20.99.)