Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (review)

Kaye’s new book is based on path-breaking research that accomplishes something unthinkable at this late date: It excavates a too-rarely used, massive set of sources that reports new words from ex-slaves speaking about their experiences before emancipation. Kaye also essays a new interpretation of the nature of enslaved African Americans’ community and culture. Perhaps some readers will ultimately find his conclusions unconvincing; others might find Kaye persuasive. Yet, on the whole, his book is a rewarding, even exciting contribution to the scholarship of slavery and African-American history.

In his investigation of enslaved people’s lives and community in the Natchez District of Mississippi, Kaye pioneers the use of the pension files of African-American Civil War veterans to study slavery. Historians have been daunted by this source’s massive size; the index alone runs to 2,800 reels of microfilm. What Kaye does with the applications for federal pensions is both clever and inspiring. Since veterans or their widows could apply, and since marriages in slavery could only be substantiated in retrospect by the testimony of people who recognized and remembered those marriages, pension seekers marshaled witnesses who had known them during slavery. From the patient sifting of their affidavits and depositions emerges a portrait of how enslaved people lived—their markers and milestones, children, break-ups, courtships and forced departures. Supplemented by Kaye’s thorough survey of extant planter manuscript sources, Joining Places presents a detailed, breathing portrait of slavery in the Natchez District, one that sometimes is shocking in its living tints.

Kaye also intervenes in a long-running argument about slave community and culture. He insists that studies of resistance and community have introduced an “anachronistic liberal framework” to the study of slavery, positing a “liberal” slave and then assigning him/her “autonomy.” Yet he also maintains that historians want to convince themselves and their audience that a form of racial consciousness served as the bedrock of slaves’ identity. Liberalism, with its focus on the autonomous individual, seems a different sort of ideology from the racialized group identity posited by the scholars of slave “community.” If this circle can be squared, Kaye does not quite accomplish it here.

Kaye proposes instead to introduce a new paradigm for understanding the nature of slaves’ ideas and deeply structured beliefs—their habitus (my term; Kaye leans on Anthony Giddens’ ideas about “structuration”).¹ Specifically, he offers the concept that he first introduced in Slavery and Abolition, the “neighborhood.” ² Slaves, he argues, conceived of their world at the “neighborhood” level, viewing all those unfamiliar—even if they were also slaves—as outsiders. This concept gives us much to chew on, for it is made from the meat of ex-slaves’ own words. But Kaye provides tough chunks of gristle, too. Eventually, in Kaye’s account, “the neighborhood” starts to decide and to do things by itself. Explaining too much, he explains too little. Still, the point that slaves, like all people, constructed concentric circles of community (family, kin, individual quarter, and neighborhood) that shaped their lives as they crisscrossed their borders is well taken. Many will find Kaye’s arguments challenging, and all who study slavery in North America need to read this important new work.