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182 13 . Y . Black Providers e nslaved and free black mothers in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South had their hands tied by various strings: their sex, their race, their status as bound or beholden laborers. Seemingly, they could offer their children little. Like other women, though, black mothers found ways to provide food, clothing, education, and employment for their sons and daughters; they took scraps from the kitchen, crafted makeshift garments, and cajoled their masters and mistresses for favors and guarantees. The ways in which these women provided for their children prove that motherhood, for most women, meant seizing control of what little was in one’s power and fighting for the material and emotional success of one’s children. By the middle of the eighteenth century, plantation slavery had spread across most of the english colonies in the tillable South. The rise of large-scale systems of agriculture restricted most of the freedoms that seventeenth-century africans and african americans had enjoyed in the colonies, and it affected the makeup of enslaved communities. Southern slave populations over the course of the eighteenth century became both more fragmented, since familial and community connections had been broken long before they reached america, and more cohesive, as improving mortality rates meant that more and more enslaved people were american-born. By midcentury, african americans outnumbered africans in slave societies along the Chesapeake.1 Simultaneously, a balancing sex ratio meant that women began assuming a larger role in the fields and in families by the 1750s. They took up the hoe, raised children, and sustained ceremonies and rituals that reminded them of home.2 in this context, black mothers used both west african memories and american innovations to provide for their children within a southern society that was testing the limits of violence, racism, and greed. 183 black providers ƒ Z % field labor would not have been alien to most women brought from africa; most african societies, from the ibo to the yoruba, employed women as agricultural laborers to varying degrees, both in tilling fields and tending home gardens , where they grew yams, gourds, onions, and okra.3 in west africa, where the savannas gave way to lush forest, men felled the trees and cleared the land, while women tilled, planted, and harvested. among matrilineal societies, such gendered labor was logical, since women held the rights to the land and were thus responsible for tending it. Regardless of matrilineages, over half of all field labor in sub-Saharan africa was performed by women.4 as a result, most women in west africa had no sense of a divide between “public” and “private” labor; there were tasks that men completed and others that were assigned to women, but there was little sense of a protected, domesticated, feminized “home.”5 in america, enslaved women’s duties varied by region, and a coastal South Carolina rice plantation required different skills from a virginia tobacco field or an urban household. in South Carolina, some enslaved women worked with rice, planting, weeding, and harvesting their crops in waterlogged fields under the summer sun, and then winnowing and storing the crop in the winter months. others farmed indigo, which required carefully timed cycles of picking , fermenting, and filtering the plant into the rich blue dye. Most field work in the low country was organized by the task system, in which planters, many of whom were operating plantations from afar, set out a specific amount of work to be done rather than holding slaves to certain hours of labor. Most virginia and North Carolina plantations subscribed to the gang system of labor, in which groups of slaves were required to work together at repetitive labor (planting, hoeing, weeding) for as long as the planter deemed necessary. here, women planted tobacco seedlings in the spring and tended them—pinching the stalks, pulling off suckers, plucking out worms—until the September harvest, after which their hands turned to drying and packing.6 The majority of women’s labor, then, was directed into extremely restricted channels; unlike the wide variety of agricultural and domestic labor that african women performed, or the largely self-determined labor of white and indian women, black women in the South discovered that their work provided for another woman’s family. as a result, enslaved mothers had to adjust their measures of success, looking for new sources of familial security but also for new sources of pride. [13.59.122.162] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 07:16 GMT...

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