Most Enslaved People in the South Maintained Their Family Histories by
Advisor: Heather Williams, Professor of History, Academy of Northward Carolina at Chapel Hill, National Humanities Eye Fellow.
Copyright National Humanities Middle, 2011
How did slavery shape the family life of the enslaved in the American South?
Understanding
The slave family did all the things families ordinarily do, but the fact that other man beings endemic its members made it vulnerable to unique constrictions, disruptions, frustrations, and pain.
"Cumberland Landing, Va. Group of 'contrabands' at Foller'southward house," photograph by James F. Gibson, 14 May 1862 (detail).
Text
Selections from the WPA interviews of formerly enslaved African Americans, 1936–1938
, from The Making of African American Identity, Vol. I
Secondary Source: "How Slavery Affected African American Families" by Heather Andrea Williams in Freedom'south Story from the National Humanities Heart
Text Type
Narrative non-fiction with a articulate purpose, slightly circuitous structure and knowledge demands, and moderately complex language demands.
Text Complexity
Grades 4-5 complexity band. Note: due to the subject matter, transcribed dialect, and one case of cursing, the selections are more appropriate for center and high schoolhouse students.
For more than data on text complexity see these resources from achievethecore.org.
Click hither for standards and skills for this lesson.
10
Common Core State Standards
- ELA-LITERACY.RI.9-10.2 (Determine a theme or cardinal idea of a text…)
- ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.4 (Make up one's mind the significant of words and phrases equally they are used in the text…)
Advanced Placement US History
- Key Concept 4.ane (iii-C) (Enslaved and gratis African Americans…created communities and strategies to protect their dignity and their family structures…)
Teacher'southward Note
To prepare to teach the WPA narratives on family life under slavery, outset read Professor Heather Andrea Williams's essay "How Slavery Affected African American Families" in Freedom'southward Story from the National Humanities Centre. Professor Williams notes that although most enslaved men and women formed families, these families were always vulnerable. Explore with your students the nature of this vulnerability. Parents and children could be the holding of different owners. Separation was always a threat as family members could be sold or sent away co-ordinate to the needs and wishes of the slaveholder. However, when teaching this material, information technology is important to keep in mind the get-go role of this lesson'due south understanding: "The slave family did all the things families normally practice." Like all families, those of the enslaved created a individual earth in which individuals could exist mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, grandparents, etc. Slave families provided love and companionship, taught values, offered solace, imposed bailiwick, constructed histories, bestowed identities, and by and large gave the enslaved a space in which they could they could assert themselves. Emphasizing this "normality" will aid students overcome the stereotype of slaves as helpless, passive victims.
Sarah Graves, ca. 1937
While the start passage, Malindy Maxwell'south reminiscence of her wedding, does not accost all of the nurturing aspects of family life, information technology does offer insight into the terms upon which a caste of stability and fifty-fifty a modicum of happiness could be established under slavery. Nonetheless, it also illustrates the extent to which enslaved families existed at the sufferance of owners. That the members of a slave family were endemic by others gave people exterior the family the accented correct to intrude upon the family's private world and profoundly disrupt information technology at will.
In the second passage, the testimony of Sarah Frances Shaw Graves illustrates the threat of separation under which slave families lived. Information technology too highlights the slaveholder's ability to forcefulness slaves into marriages, to isolate them, and to control their knowledge of and access to the wider world. At the same time, though, information technology illustrates how slaves could subtly turn the conditions of their chains into resistance.
The terminal passage, Robert Glenn'south business relationship of his separation from his family, offers boosted insights into slave life. While the institution enabled some highly skilled slaves to earn money — their owners hired them out and allowed them to retain some of the money their work brought in — information technology curtailed what they could do with their savings. They could not, for one affair, own slaves. Hence, they could not keep their families intact by purchasing kin. The passage illustrates how the vagaries of the slave organisation abetted by prejudice shattered the family lives of even privileged slaves.
Background
Contextualizing Questions
- What kind of text are we dealing with?
- When was information technology written?
- Who wrote information technology?
- For what audience was information technology intended?
- For what purpose was information technology written?
Between 1936 and 1938 the Federal Writers Projection of the Works Project Administration, a New Deal bureau, sent field workers, most of whom were white, into seventeen states to interview former slaves about their lives in chains. They compiled over 2,000 accounts, which at present reside in the Library of Congress. For many years scholars discounted their reliability as historical show. They were, of course, subject to the lapses and biases that misconstrue all memories. Moreover, scholars suspected that the item circumstances of their collection made them especially susceptible to concealments and evasions. Would elderly African Americans, who passed from slavery to Jim Crow, be completely forthright with white strangers asking probing questions about a painful subject?
Despite such concerns, gimmicky scholars have come to realize the value of the interviews. When using them, teachers and students should keep 3 considerations in mind. First, they are, in the words of the Library of Congress's website, "highly impressionistic." Second, they yield insight into only certain aspects of the slave experience. Every bit the Library of Congress notes, "if ane wishes to understand the nature of the 'peculiar institution' from the perspective of the slave, to reconstruct the cultural and social milieu of the slave customs, or to analyze the social dynamics of the slave system," and then the WPA narratives "are not simply relevant; they are essential." Third, the interviewers transcribed oral testimony and used words and punctuation that sometimes seem to reverberate their own expectations rather than the way people actually spoke. In some cases the spelling and punctuation reveal more about the interviewer than the interviewed.
In volumes 1 and two of the teaching anthologies The Making of African American Identity, the National Humanities Center has made the WPA Slave Narratives highly teachable by excerpting brief cardinal passages and organizing them thematically. Click on the links below to explore the listed themes.
Capture | Accounts of enslavement | Being sold | Plantation life | Plantation labor | Sexual abuse of slaves | Slaves' resistance | Running abroad | The enslaved family | The plantation community | Slaves' religious do | Running away | Transition to liberty | Pursuit of learning | Suicide as liberty | Slaves in the Ceremonious State of war | Fighting in the Civil War | Emancipation, 1864–1865 | Reflections on Slavery | The moment of liberty
Text Assay
Excerpts from the WPA Slave Narratives, 1936-1938
Shut Reading Questions
1. From this passage what tin you surmise nearly Malindy Maxwell's status on the Shans plantation? What evidence leads you to this theorize?
Malindy was the daughter of slaves who were probably well treated and considered "close" to their white owners. 2 unlike owners allowed her parents to be married past a white minister and provided her mother with a wedding ceremony dress and wedding dinner.
two. What bear witness in this passage suggests that Mrs. Maxwell and her hubby accomplished a degree of stability in their family unit life?
They had seven children.
iii. On what atmospheric condition did that stability depend?
The stability depended upon her parents remaining adequately shut to each other geographically.
4. How does this passage advise the precariousness of family life for the enslaved?
The stability depended upon the parents' geographic proximity to each other; either could have been sold or willed to others by his or her master. The fact that they belonged to two different masters contributed to the precariousness. Her parents had no personal control over where they lived.
i. Malindy Maxwell: I was born close to Como and Sardis, Mississippi. My chief and mistress was Sam Shans and Miss Cornelia Shans. I was born a slave. They endemic mama and Master Rube Sanders endemic pa. Neither possessor wouldn't sell but they agreed to let ma and pa marry. They had a white preacher and they married out in the grand and had a big tabular array full of weddin' supper, and the white folks et in the house. They had a big supper besides. Ma said they had a big crowd. The preacher read the ceremony. Miss Cornelia give her a white clothes and white shoes and Miss Cloe Wilburn give her a veil. Miss Cloe was some connectedness of Rube Sanders. They had seven children. I'm the oldest — three of us living. After 'mancipation pa went to see almost marrying ma over agen and they told him that marriage would stand long as ever he lived.
5. How does this passage illustrate a slaveowner'southward power to disrupt the family unit life of slaves?
This passage tells of a married couple being separated, with the wife moved to a dissimilar state. The wife intentionally was prevented from knowing the whereabouts of her husband.
six. How does it illustrate a chief's power to isolate and control slave'southward knowledge of and access to the wider world?
Past moving her to another country and not allowing Sarah'southward mother to know the whereabouts of her husband, the owner wishes to command Sarah's mother and force her to remarry (she would not remarry if she knew her start husband was alive) in gild to take more children and produce more slaves. By limiting her knowledge of the wider world the owner sought to control Sarah'southward mother'southward life.
7. How does Sarah's mother transform her family life into an human action of resistance?
She refuses to remarry a human past whom she can have children. Instead she marries "Tattle Barber" who was sick and could not father children.
two. Sarah Graves: I was born March 23, 1850 in Kentucky, somewhere about Louisville. I am goin' on 88 years right now. I was brought to Missouri when I was six months quondam, forth with my mama, who was a slave owned by a human being named Shaw, who had allotted her to a homo named Jimmie Graves, who came to Missouri to live with his daughter Emily Graves Crowdes…. We left my papa in Kentucky, 'cause he was allotted to another human. My papa never knew where my mama went, an' my mama never knew where papa went… They never wanted mama to know, 'crusade they knowed she would never marry and then long she knew where he was. Our master wanted her to marry once again and raise more children to exist slaves. They never wanted mama to know where papa was an' she never did…. Mama said she would never marry over again to take children,… and then she married my step-father, Tattle Barber, 'crusade he was ill an' could never be a begetter. He was so sick he couldn't work, and then me and mama had to work hard. We lived in a kitchen, a room in a log firm joined on to the primary's house. My mama worked in the field, even when I was a little baby. She would lay me down on a pallet [pocket-sized wooden platform] virtually the fence while she plowed the corn or worked in the field.
8. What prove suggests that Glenn's family enjoyed a degree of stability?
The parents were together when the son was auctioned.
9. What does the passage suggest about the status of Glenn'south father? Cite specific evidence to back up your conjecture.
The father was allowed to be hired out, and had saved plenty money to effort to buy his son. He was aided by some whites and this suggests that he was trusted and had continuing.
10. What forces prevent Glenn's begetter from keeping his family intact?
Laws that prevented slaves from owning slaves prevented his father from buying him outright and keeping his family intact. The speculator's unwillingness to sell the male child to a black man prevented the father from putting upwards the coin for the child and letting whites hire him out.
3. Robert Glenn: [My owner] died when I was viii years old [1858] and I was put on the block to be sold…. I was bought by a Negro speculator* by the proper name of Henry Long who lived not far from Hurdles Mill in Person Canton. I was not allowed to tell my mother and father farewell. I was bought and sold three times in one mean solar day. My male parent'due south time was hired out and as he knew a trade he had, by working overtime, saved up a considerable amount of money. Afterward the speculator, Henry Long, bought me, mother went to father and pled with him to buy me from him and let the white folks hire me out. No slave could own a slave. Male parent got the consent and help of his owners to purchase me and they asked Long to put me on the auction block again. Long did and so and named his price but when he learned who had bid me off he backed downwards. Afterward in the twenty-four hours he put me on the block and named another price much higher than the price formerly gear up. He was asked by the white folks to proper name his price for his bargain and he did and then. I was again put on the auction cake and begetter bought me in, putting up the cash. Long so flew into a rage and cursed my father saying, "You damn black son of a bitch, you lot call up you are white do you? Now simply to testify you are black, I will not let you take your son at any price." Father knew it was all off, female parent was frantic but at that place was nothing they could do about it. They had to stand and see the speculator put me on his equus caballus behind him and ride abroad without assuasive either of them to tell me bye. I figure I was sold 3 times in one mean solar day, as the price asked was offered in each instance. Mother was told under threat of a whupping not to make whatever outcry when I was carried away.
* Editor's note: Long is a white human who speculated in the buying and selling of Negroes.
Follow-Upwards Consignment
Have your students extend the list of things that families normally do, then send them to the collection of WPA Slave Narrative excerpts on family unit life found in The Making of African American Identity, Vol. 1 and take them identify ways in which slave families did those things.
Using the aforementioned collection of slave narrative excerpts, have your students identify specific sources of the chronic instability that plagued slave families. Too see the complete WPA Slave Narrative collection from the Library of Congress.
Images courtesy of the Library of Congress:
– Photograph of newly freed slaves, including men, women, and children, captioned "Cumberland Landing, Va. Group of 'contrabands' at Foller'southward firm," photograph by James F. Gibson, 14 May 1862 (detail). Civil War Drinking glass Negative Collection, LC-DIG-cwpb-01005.
– Portrait photograph of Sarah Frances Shaw Graves, former slave, age 87, Skidmore, Missouri, ca. 1937 (particular). WPA Federal Writers' Project Collection.
Source: https://americainclass.org/family-life-of-the-enslaved/
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