The Quarters and the Fields: Slave Families in the Non-Cotton South

3. Family Contact during Working Hours

3 Family Contact during Working Hours The nature of work on agricultural units in various localities of the noncotton South and the development of regional agriculture in general, examined earlier, set the context for the following two chapters; these focus on the effects of work and agriculture on the daily experiences of the men, women, and children who lived in bondage in each of the three regions. Enslaved families encountered a complicated framework of boundaries and opportunities in both their public world of work for the master and their somewhat more private world of the slave quarters. For this study it is convenient to divide slaves’ waking hours into two parts: their time for the master, which consumed most of their day, and their time for themselves, including evenings and free days such as Sunday. This chapter addresses the experiences of slave families during working hours. How did work and the nature of regional agriculture affect slave family contact during their time for the master? What kinds of boundaries and opportunities did work patterns and the specific demands for cultivating various cash crops create for parenthood and child care during working hours? Under what circumstances were enslaved people afforded the opportunity to work together with their family members during the day? And how did slave families react to these boundaries and opportunities? The answers to these questions are further explored here for slave families living in northern Virginia, lowcountry South Carolina, and southern Louisiana. A Lack of Bonding Time: Fairfax County, Virginia Labor arrangements and the nature of slave-based agriculture in northern Virginia conspired to limit slaves’ control over their working hours and severely restrict opportunities to negotiate for family contact. As in other regions of the slave South, families in Fairfax County were generally 64 / Part II. The Balancing Act: Work and Families confronted with systematic segregation during the workday. Such divisions ran two ways. Family members were separated both by age—young, ablebodied , and elderly—as well as by sex, according to their perceived ability and usefulness on the farm. The extreme lack of flexibility for slave families in Fairfax County in negotiating around such segregation was particularly trying, however, especially for parents with small children. As the following will show, work and the nature of local agriculture in many ways thwarted opportunities for family contact on the grain farms; however, contact between some able-bodied family members in the fields—especially on small farms—may have been common and probably improved over time. Pregnancy and child care in Fairfax County posed an especially difficult challenge that disproportionately burdened enslaved women with the responsibility of reconciling their formal work with parental duties. Faced with declining productivity and shrinking labor forces, slaveholders in northern Virginia required physical labor from all women whether they were pregnant or not; consequently, pregnant bondswomen and the mothers of newborn infants frequently found that the pressing demands of mixed farming overrode the needs of their unborn or newborn children. Lacking both time and flexibility, local enslaved women found this a situation they were usually powerless to change.1 In northern Virginia, pregnant women were kept in the fields until shortly before they gave birth, although advanced pregnancy usually meant less work, if not in theory then in practice. One local overseer complained to his employer that “2 or 3 of the Negroe women are pregnant which will throw me behind in my crops,” indicating that these women worked more slowly than the others, perhaps on purpose. Even when they were near their time and unable to perform some of the more strenuous field tasks, however, they could always be given lighter chores around the farm until they gave birth, from milking cows to weeding in the vegetable garden.2 Quite soon after their children were born, moreover, new mothers in northern Virginia were expected to fulfill their normal labor quotas again. For slave women in the antebellum South as a whole, according to historian Sally McMillen, four weeks appears to have been the average confinement period, or “lying-in period,” after childbirth. Yet research by Brenda Stevenson has revealed that slaveholders throughout northern Virginia permitted an average lying-in period of only about two weeks before ordering new mothers back to work (a practice that also appears to have been common in the rest of the state according to historian Wilma Dunaway). Enslaved women in the region had little choice in the matter, and indeed were often [18.223.171.12] Project MUSE...