Introduction

The introduction presents an overview of the literature on the family and masculinity within slavery, arguing that in order to appreciate the adaptability and multiplicity of enslaved families, scholars should focus on how kin units functioned rather than on the form of households. To fully understand fatherhood within slavery, it is critical to recognize multilocal kin networks and to assess the contributions of non-resident, but engaged fathers. This book builds on recent scholarship that posits multiple masculinities in enslaved communities and explores the masculine hierarchy of slavery. In the Old South, masculinity took on a public and private dichotomy with public expressions of manhood available only to white men. Enslaved men could at times exhibit masculinity privately and within the bounds of the plantation and slave quarters. One consistent ideal of manhood in African American communities was that of caretaker. The introduction refutes misperceptions of African American families and missing Black fathers, arguing that because enslaved and postwar freedmen lacked access to recognized patriarchal power, their hidden caretaking behavior has long been obscured.

An Archaeology and History of a Caribbean Sugar Plantation on Antigua

An Archaeology and History of a Caribbean Sugar Plantation on Antigua uses archaeological and documentary evidence to reconstruct daily life at Betty’s Hope plantation on the island of Antigua, one of the largest sugar plantations in the Caribbean. It demonstrates the rich information that the multidisciplinary approach of contemporary historical archaeology can offer when assessing the long-term impacts of sugarcane agriculture on the region and its people. Drawing on ten years of research at the 300-year-old site, the researchers uncover the plantation’s inner workings and its connections to broader historical developments in the Atlantic World. Excavations at the Great House reveal similarities to other British colonial sites, and historical records reveal the owners’ involvement in the Atlantic slave trade and in the trade of rum and other commodities. Artifacts uncovered from the slave quarters—ceramic tokens, repurposed bottle glass, and hundreds of Afro-Antiguan pottery sherds—speak to the agency of enslaved peoples in the face of harsh living conditions. Contributors also use ethnographic field data collected from interviews with contemporary farmers, as well as soil analysis to demonstrate how three centuries of sugarcane monocropping created a complicated legacy of soil depletion. Today tourism has long surpassed sugar as Antigua’s primary economic driver. Looking at visitor exhibits and new technologies for exploring and interpreting the site, the volume discusses best practices in cultural heritage management at Betty’s Hope and other locations that are home to contested historical narratives of a colonial past.

Rufino’s Recife

After a second sojourn in Sierra Leone, where he continued his studies of the Qur’ān and Arabic, Rufino returns to Brazil. Before settling in Recife he spent some time in Rio de Janeiro and Bahia, from where he brought a teenaged son, Nicolau José. In Recife he settled on the Rua da Senzala Velha (Old Slave Quarters Street). Although a small community, the Yoruba-speaking popoulation of Recife were not an insignificant minority. They included slaves, freedmen, and free Africans, and some were Muslims like Rufino, while others practiced African and Afro-Brazilian religions. One of the Muslim Yoruba speakers was Mohammah Gardo Baquaqua, who arrived in Pernambuco in 1845.

I Do Not Buy My Freedom Because I Am Not a Fool

The first part of the chapter analyzes the different paths by which slaves acquired environmental knowledge: importing skills and strategies from equatorial Africa, acquiring knowledge when doing agricultural work in plantations and farms, and maintaining interethnic contacts with Indians. As they learned the ways of local peasants, the enslaved gradually built entire parallel economies with vigorous ties to the expanding network of commercial houses that existed in late nineteenth-century Amazonia. Instead of using the term “internal economy of slavery,” I conceptualize them as an economy that ran parallel to that of their masters, given the size and complexity of the commercial networks in which the slaves participated. The chapter also describes the process of community formation inside the slave quarters at the time of Amazonia’s rubber boom, which had both a positive and negative impact on the prospects of Amazonia’s black slaves. On the one hand, it made it possible for them to expand their parallel economy. On the other hand, that slaves could carry out such a broad scope of activities meant that the slaveowners could adapt to the changes of the era. In Amazonia slavery was just like rubber: flexible and adaptable to multiple conditions – hence its durability.

Gullah-Geechee settlement patterns from slavery to freedom: Investigation of a Georgia plantation slave quarter

Gullah-Geechee is a creole culture that emerged among enslaved African Americans in the coastal Southeastern United States. Modern material expressions of this culture include a distinctive settlement type, the family compound, consisting of loosely clustered residences and outbuildings. The arrangement of these settlements resembles colonial slave quarters but differs from antebellum “slave rows.” Gullah-Geechee family compounds existed by the mid-20th century, but their origin, time depth, and evolution from linear quarters are unclear. Archaeological study of the Wilson–Miller plantation slave quarter near Savannah, occupied over most of the 19th Century, indicated that the Gullah-Geechee residential compound appeared soon after Emancipation. The study also suggested that communal outdoor space was important in maintaining cultural practices that were expressed in both colonial and post-Emancipation settlement patterns.

States of Nature

This chapter focuses on Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis' standard interpretation of the tar baby story. Recurring themes in this interpretation include the affirmative emphasis on the independent culture of the slave quarters, construed as a counterbalance to the deadening routine of suffering and exploitation; the idea that stories like the tar baby were designed to instruct slaves in the methods necessary for survival, encouraging caution and modeling tactics of deception and misdirection; and the suggestion that there is nothing “distant and abstract” about the tar baby, as the story is grounded in everyday existence. This interpretation extends to twentieth-century folklore anthologies describing the vicarious satisfaction that slaves found by identifying with the underdog in trickster stories.