‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America (review)

In The Underground Rail Road (1872/2003) William Still collects materials and narratives generated by people of African descent who found ways to escape from bondage in the United States. The documents found in Still’s volume includes two letters written by Isaac Forman, who managed his escape to Canada from Norfolk, Virginia, in December 1853. Shortly after arriving north of the border, Forman wrote to Still inquiring about the prospect of being united with his wife, who remained enslaved in Richmond. In his second letter, dated May 7, 1854, Forman explains, “My soul is vexed, my troubles are inexpressible . . . I must see my wife in short or not, I will die . . . I was once happy but never will be again, until I see her; because what is freedom to me when I know that my wife is in slavery?”

In ‘Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Love and Marriage in African America, Frances Smith Foster recalls and revisits Forman’s words. While she describes Forman’s story as “incomplete”—reminding her readers “that we don’t even know his wife’s name” or “if he and his wife were reunited”—Foster regards letters as solid evidence that marriage made a significant impact upon and within the lives lived by people of African descent living in the antebellum United States. Foster goes on to explain that Isaac Forman “contradicts the dominant historical narratives that say that for enslaved people love and marriage were too fragile to withstand separation” (121). When placed beside the other literary and archival materials she examines in Death or Distance, the Forman letters provide access to a set of powerful and encompassing myths that Foster interrogates in this valuable study of love and marriage and African American experience.

Foster asserts that layers of ignorance and misperception obstruct the influence that love and marriage had among people of African descent living in the antebellum United States. Throughout Death or Distance she delivers an account of the complex legal, social, and familial circumstances that African Americans experienced in the antebellum United States, arguing that this extended misreading of slavery and marriage obscures and distorts understandings of African American life. By doing so Death or Distance reframes and reconsiders conventional wisdom regarding the institution of slavery and marriage as well as African American humanity. Identifying ways in which presumed and actual connections between slavery, love, and marriage have shaped (and continues to shape) contemporary African American experience, the study presents readers with an entry point to the past, with the expressed hope of helping her readers, African Americans and not, understand this past more fully. As such Death or Distance stands as a “Sankofa text,” this is, as Foster explains, intended to provoke her audience to “understand how the past can impact [their] present” (xx).

To carry out this project Foster calls on a broad range of witnesses to antebellum African American life in the United States. The love and lives of seventeenth-century Africans in Jamestown, Virginia (Issabella and Antony Negro), eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black writers Phyllis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, and Henry Bibb, and notable antebellum African American couples such as William and Ellen Craft and John and Elizabeth Boston, converge in Death or Distance. They speak to the various ways that people of African descent acted with devotion to each other, in defiance of the laws and customs of the peculiar institution and prevailing social convention. Providing a set of “known instances,” Foster deploys these figures and others to document the existence of a profound, nuanced set of conversations about love and marriage within the social/cultural space that she refers to as “African America.” As it ushers forth these voices (as well as their accompanying silences) Death and Distance insures that they receive “a proper hearing.” Foster’s Sankofa scholarship thereby provides a broad range of readers with information and instruction about the intimate relationship between present conditions and antebellum African American experience...