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What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast?
A History of the Enslaved Black Family
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2023
Summary
The legacy of the slave family haunts the status of black Americans in modern U.S. society. Stereotypes that first entered the popular imagination in the form of plantation lore have continued to distort the African American social identity. In What Sorrows Labour in My Parents' Breast?, Brenda Stevenson provides a long overdue concise history to help the reader understand this vitally important African American institution as it evolved and survived under the extreme opposition that the institution of slavery imposed. The themes of this work center on the multifaceted reality of loss, recovery, resilience and resistance embedded in the desire of African/African descended people to experience family life despite their enslavement. These themes look back to the critical loss that Africans, both those taken and those who remained, endured, as the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley honors in the line—“What sorrows labour in my parents’ breast?,” and look forward to the generations of slaves born through the Civil War era who struggled to realize their humanity in the recreation of family ties that tied them, through blood and emotion, to a reality beyond their legal bondage to masters and mistresses. Stevenson pays particular attention to the ways in which gender, generation, location, slave labor, the economic status of slaveholders and slave societies’ laws affected the black family in slavery.
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Bibliographic data
Copyright Year
2023
ISBN-Print
978-1-4422-5216-5
ISBN-Online
978-1-4422-5217-2
Publisher
Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language
English
Pages
429
Product Type
Monograph
Table of contents
ChapterPages
Contents No access
Acknowledgments No access
Introduction: The Black Family in the Public Imagination: What’s Slavery and Slavery Scholarship Got to Do with It? No access Pages 1 - 36
1 Traditions from Whence They Came: Marriage and Family in Western/Central Africa at the Time of the Atlantic Slave Trade No access
2 The Colonial Enslaved Family: Foundations and Creations No access
3 Traditions of Resistance and Family from the Colonial Era Forward No access
4 Antebellum Courtship and Marital Rituals No access
5 Antebellum Family Life No access
6 Death and Resurrection No access
Conclusion: Bob Samuels’s American Family No access Pages 301 - 308
Appendix A: Godfrey Family Units No access Pages 309 - 318
Appendix B: Percentage of Households Per State with Enslaved People, 1860 No access Pages 319 - 322
