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  • Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South
  • Thomas C. Buchanan
Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. By Anthony E. Kaye. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. 376. Cloth $34.95.)

This is one of the best books on American slavery to appear in recent years, and that is quite an achievement, considering the quality of scholarship in the field. Kaye’s innovative book argues that slaves in the Natchez district had local, neighborhood identities, carefully crafted through overlapping ties of kinship and labor. He argues that slaves’ actions must always be considered in the context of their dependent relationship with their masters. Masters’ initiatives structured neighborhood relations, and slaves responded, reshaping their worlds as best they could under severe restraints. The book makes the reader feel a sense of being trapped since enslaved people were confined to local neighborhood spaces where the master class more easily exploited them. For Kaye, individual enslaved people were often forced to appeal to owners for marginal benefits as often as they were able to achieve goals through collective action with other enslaved people in the neighborhood. Scholars have written about these themes for years, but never with Kaye’s mixture of empirical depth, stylistic grace, and theoretical sophistication. Together these themes make Joining Places a decisive break from Civil Rights–era scholarship that celebrated the slave community (a term Kaye rejects) as a nurturing breeding ground of African American agency.

Readers of this book will be most interested in his final chapter, titled “War and Emancipation.” Kaye argues that emancipation was a process and one that slowly unfolded over the war years as Union troops advanced and emancipation became a war aim. The Emancipation Proclamation, the siege of Vicksburg, the enlistment of African Americans from the neighborhoods of Natchez led to the most important transformation of all: the end of the war. It was not until the war ended that enslaved peoples could begin to challenge the boundaries of their neighborhoods and engage new political [End Page 84] identities. Kaye follows previous scholars in seeing emancipation as a decisive break toward freedom but maintains that neighborhood identities remained intact as former slaves largely stayed in the local areas where their kin lived and worked. Dependence on local planters was diminished but remained central to day-to-day life.

Kaye overstates his case. He brilliantly picks up on recent interest in empire and the experience of living amidst oppressive regimes, but there is a danger lurking here of deromanticizing agency to the point of engaging in unwarranted historical pessimism. If his new dialogue between the present and the past has the virtue of stressing the historical continuities of exploitation, it also picks up on a current scepticism about the possibilities of solidarity among working people. This is manifested in Joining Places in the design of its study. Though Kaye links himself with what he calls a new “spatial turn” in history, he persistently defines space in a way that leaves out the group of African Americans most threatening to slaveholders: maritime workers. There is no doubt that enslaved people in the Natchez plantation districts had their most intimate bonds with other plantation bondspeople, but this did not isolate them from the broader world. On the plantation landings of Mississippi, enslaved people worked alongside people whose day-to-day lives were cosmopolitan. The radical possibilities of these connections are evident in historian Stephanie M. H. Camp’s account of a Mississippi plantation woman posting in her cabin abolitionist literature received from a boatman (Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004], chapter 4). This example demonstrates the interrelationship between the northern abolitionist movement and slave resistance. Runaways from the region, which more often than not used the river world to escape, illustrate the flip side of this dialectical and spatial relationship. Their stories became central to the abolitionist cause. By neglecting such themes, and emphasizing enslaved peoples’ dependence on masters for information, Kaye effectively robs them of their most significant claims to power.

This is a provocative book, and that is part of its greatness. Kaye...

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