Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia (review)

In her new study of gender and slavery in antebellum Georgia, Daina Berry explores a number of topics: agricultural and nonagricultural labor, enslaved family and community, and the role of enslaved laborers in the informal economy. Focusing on upcountry Wilkes County and lowcountry Glynn County, Berry makes creative use of a variety of sources, including plantation records, African American folk songs, slave narratives, and the personal papers of elite whites in order to present an overview of the significance of gender in shaping the experiences of enslaved laborers.

Berry argues effectively that enslaved women’s agricultural labor required a high level of skill that was recognized and valued by both slave owners and plantation managers. Many previous scholars have found that enslaved women were generally barred from work in crafts of any kind—as carpenters, blacksmiths, and so on—and Berry does not question this finding. By refining our understanding of what constitutes skilled labor and including new categories under that rubric, however, Berry is able to battle the assertion that enslaved women were generally employed in unskilled labor. The use of mechanical cotton gins, for example, was a skilled task performed primarily by a small group of women on the St. Simons Island plantation of Kelvin Grove. Berry argues that “the importance of these women to Kelvin Grove’s productivity shatters assumptions about gender, labor, and skill” (21). By considering the level of skill required for many “non-agricultural” (35) types of labor assigned to enslaved women, Berry further bolsters her argument, concluding that tasks like sewing, nursing, and cooking also demanded high levels of skill. Moreover, enslaved women who engaged in such tasks were frequently allowed to travel outside the boundaries of the plantation, bringing into question the assumption that because women were rarely employed in crafts or the maritime industry, they had less geographic mobility than their male counterparts.

Berry’s study might have benefited from greater attention to recent work on the gender division of labor in rice agriculture. Judith Carney’s Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA, 2001) demonstrates that many African women brought skills in rice processing with them on their voyages across the Atlantic, but Berry makes little use of Carney’s insights and never explores how African agricultural practices may have shaped the gender division of labor on Georgian rice plantations. This omission points to a broader problem with Berry’s study: Though she packs her book with interesting anecdotes about the experiences of African Americans in antebellum Georgia, she never considers how surviving African cultural practices shaped these experiences. This problem is exacerbated by her reliance on the Works Progress Administration slave narratives, which were collected during the 1930s from formerly enslaved men and women who were necessarily separated by a great temporal gulf from the trans-Atlantic journeys of their African ancestors.

In her discussion of enslaved family and community, Berry explores the “rituals” that enslaved laborers employed to cement the bonds of kinship and community. She describes how the enslaved were able to bind themselves together through courtship and marriage rituals, religious activities, dances, and what she calls “working socials” (3)—gatherings that combined tasks like quilting and roof mending with social interaction. Berry’s discussion adds to our understanding of enslaved culture, but it is hampered throughout by an overly homogenous view of the enslaved community. She describes, for example, how African American folk songs illustrate the drive to incorporate new church members with the Christian fold during this period, emphasizing that worship meetings provided opportunities to bind together enslaved communities. Yet Sylvia Frey and Betty Wood’s recent book, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), suggests that efforts by early nineteenth-century church members to police the behavior of their co-religionists [End Page 274...