Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840-1950 (review)

Historical archaeology is a relatively new interdisciplinary social science that incorporates the interpretation of archeological artifacts into a broad examination of traditional documentary and oral sources from the historical record. Wilkie's monograph analyzes a variety of material artifacts and synthesizes an abundance of documentary and oral sources to reveal how African-Americans at Oakley Plantation were able to create distinct identities beyond those imposed by the planters.

Wilkie analyzes material artifacts gathered from four assemblages-one antebellum slave family and three postbellum tenant families, all from households of domestic workers. She compares these artifacts with materials found in the kitchen area of the plantation great house and with archeological digs at other plantation sites. The materials include buttons, medicine bottles, glass and ceramic artifacts, toys, tobacco pipes, Native American lithics, and religious artifacts. The uses that the families made of these materials, Wilkie argues, allowed them to construct shared identities that enabled them to combat the racism and violence that they confronted as slaves and as tenants in the postbellum South.

Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, Wilkie understands the material culture of the families as integral to the construction of the habitus, that is, a way of ordering one's world within changing historical contexts.¹ For example, through the use of personal adornments, foods, patent medicines, and religion, African-Americans at Oakley Plantation constructed personal, spiritual, household, and community identities, as well as gender, racial, and ethnic identities. Wilkie argues that masters attempted to impose identities upon African-American slaves as a way to that control them. Under tenancy, however, African-American workers at Oakley Plantation were able to re-order their world by incorporating traditional folk medicines, religions, and food ways. These strategies empowered tenants in a manner that could accommodate the historical and cultural contexts of their lives.

This holistic approach has both benefits and drawbacks. By analyzing the material culture of the workers, Wilkie looks at plantation life from the African-American viewpoint rather than from that of the whites who dominate the documentary record. The focus is on domestic servants, who held a tenuous place between the white planters and the field hands. On the one hand, this narrow perspective counterbalances the integration of diverse identities into a brief study. On the other hand, by focusing primarily on domestic workers, Wilkie offers a limited analysis that weights her study toward women at the expense of an understanding of gender identity among males. Furthermore, her analysis of the material artifacts at times confuses the antebellum and postbellum contexts in a way that blurs distinctions between the two periods.