The Violence of Family Formation: Enslaved Families and Reproductive Labor in the Marketplace

My poor mother, like many other slave-women had many children, but NO FAMILY!

—Frederick Douglass

Building upon the groundbreaking work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, and Eric Williams, in recent scholarship American historians have located the marketplace in every genteel corner of the slave South: in every plantation building, court record, manicured lawn, and human body. In so doing, this generation of scholars has nearly overturned the last vestiges of both the Jim Crow–era’s paternalist vision of slave ownership as creating a benevolent “training ground” for enslaved men, women, and children, and of the assertion of more critical scholars that Southern slavery was a “feudal,” precapitalist institution. It seems only natural, then, that scholars might now return with new eyes to the classic debates over enslaved families and culture. Placing the domestic slave trade at the center of their analyses of kinship, servitude, and reproductive labor, Heather Andrea Williams and Gregory D. Smithers do just this, journeying to some of the most disturbing moments in American history. They respectively document two practices that violently shaped enslaved family formation: the separation of enslaved families by sale and the forced reproduction of enslaved labor through systemic sexual violence. Heather Williams’ Help Me to Find My People documents the “thoughts and feelings” of enslaved people and former slaves in the midst of the forced separation of African American families that characterized Southern slavery in the United States. Gregory Smithers’ Slave Breeding considers the history and memory of constant interventions by white Southerners’ into the sexual and reproductive lives of enslaved women and men, including the use of forced and coerced “breeding” practices.

While Williams and Smithers do not enter this violent terrain principally to highlight the extremities of the capitalist system of chattel slavery, they accomplish this in the course of their work. If the fundamental paradox of chattel slavery lay in the fact that slaves were both people and property, Williams and Smithers are ultimately concerned with the former: what it meant for men and women, mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, children and kin, to experience and endure lifelong commodification. What stories did enslaved people tell themselves and each other in the midst of the repetitive trauma of separation and sexual violence? What sense did they make of their lives in a world in which the “twin miracles” of birth and death were controlled, indeed owned, by others? What kinds of catharsis have family history, folklore, and storytelling—largely below and beyond the radar of professional scholarship—offered to enslaved men and women and their descendants? These are the kinds of complex questions about human survival that Williams and Smithers so bravely tackle. If the lauded historical recovery of “slaves’ agency” was accompanied by the “eclipse of institutions,” as Thomas Bender has worried, then Williams and Smithers may offer a viable third way.¹ Perhaps, these works imply, the lasting legacy of the new social history lies not in “slaves’ agency” or resistance but in the growing recognition that enslaved (and freed) people’s small stories and collective insights about their experiences can matter in big ways. Indeed, their voices can illuminate the political and economic structures that constrained their own lives, and, in turn, how they interpreted the meaning of freedom.

With their careful attention to enslaved and freedpeople’s voices and family stories, Williams’ and Smithers’ research builds most obviously upon a set of works from the last four decades on enslaved families, including John Blassingame’s Slave Community (1972), Herbert Gutman’s Black Family in Slavery and Freedom (1976), Brenda Stevenson’s Life in Black and White (1996), and Stephanie Camp’s Closer to Freedom (2003). For many enslaved people, they reveal...