Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (review)

Angela Davis once wrote that "the pursuit of health in body, mind and spirit weaves in and out of every major struggle women have ever waged in our quest for social, economic and political emancipation" (193-194). Fett takes an equally ambitious and inclusive view of health in her new study of the healing practices of African-American slaves on antebellum southern plantations. Unlike earlier work on the topic, most notably Todd Savitt's Medicine and Slavery: Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia (Urbana, 1978), Fett's interest lies less in a biomedical framework of African-American doctoring—the medicines and treatments that they used—than in the social interactions involved. She notes at the outset that just as other aspects of slave culture—from songs and stories to quilts and foodways—have been studied for what they reveal about the dynamics of acculturation and resistance inherent in southern slave life, so do the "doctoring arts belong equally to the list of complex and compelling cultural work" produced by slaves (x).

Integrating anthropological and psychological approaches with her historical analysis, Fett makes power central in explaining how masters and slaves negotiated the means by which black health concerns were resolved. "Health," she notes, "was an arena in which enslaved African-Americans and antebellum planters struggled over religion, family, sexuality, and labor" (199). Slaves were active agents not only in providing for their own physical well-being, but for that of the white families who owned them. Their doctoring drew on African traditions and an extensive knowledge of both Old World and New World plants, including recognizable influences from Native American herbal medicine as well. In an intriguing chapter on "Sacred Plants," Fett argues that this herbalism was as much spiritual as scientific, and "expressed a sacred worldview as clearly as singing, praying, or dancing" (76).

Curiously missing from Fett's title or subtitle is the fact that gender is equally central to her analysis. Much of the burden of maintaining the health of slaves fell on slave women. These women's healing powers became both a means to resist the physical and psychological degradations of their owners and a way of defending the integrity of black family and community life within their plantation world. Thus did these female practitioners acquire a status and an authority that, as enslaved women, they could never otherwise have achieved.

Fett provides little chronological context to her study; nor does she acknowledge what would seem to have been crucial differences in plantation economies. One would think that rice plantations on the Sea Islands would offer scenarios very different in terms of slave status and botanical resources from the tobacco plantations of the Chesapeake or the cotton plantations of the black belt or upcountry. Nevertheless, this book is an innovative and multifaceted exploration of one of most vital components of slaves' culture and power.