Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century by Jeffory Clymer (review)

What are the material ghosts of slavery? Where do they operate and how do they function? Some would answer that these ghosts survive in the continued use of the “N-word,” particularly when uttered by wealthy whites (think of culinary star Paula Deen or the former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers Donald Sterling). And others would point to the debilitating violence and poverty plaguing many black Americans’ communities. But what about laws, then and now, that define and govern “the family” and its wealth?

Jeffory Clymer’s Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century focuses on legal cases and fiction penned during slavery and post-slavery, to cogently answer the questions posed in the previous paragraph. He argues that slavery was, foremost, an economic institution and its legal management affected everything, from the juridical definitions of family, to what is considered property, to who can be considered the “natural” heirs of that property. Clymer builds on Toni Morrison’s assessment in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination of the omniscient presence of blackness in white American literary imaginations, and extends it into interpreting the narrativizing structures in antebellum legal cases to illuminate how the “political struggles and decisions that give birth to and undergird the laws of property become, over time, the sedimented history of economic inequality that is then perpetuated via inherited wealth” (10).

Intervening in literary studies of racial passing that have largely read the psychic and social anxieties surrounding the racially ambiguous character as an obsession with maintaining sexual apartheid across racial lines, and legal studies that have principally regarded slave law “within a narrowly political framework,” Clymer understands “interracial intimacy as a site of seemingly private turmoil that nevertheless conjured new legal and literary discourse to define and manage its economic effects” (24, 3). Clymer reads the social anxieties of the racially ambiguous character—or, more specifically, the phenotypically white person with black “blood”—as disrupting an antebellum tenet of whiteness that emphasized financial accrual and ownership that gets protected through “private wealth” or what we commonly call “family money.” What Clymer effectively demonstrates throughout the text is how the preoccupation with wealth literally mapped onto the inheritability of property, working to reinforce processes of racialization that signified whites as the sole inheritors, owners, and traders of capital. Cutting through the metaphors of blood and the affect of familial bonds, Clymer uses each chapter to dissect how the language of family and affection solidified economic interests, and further, how it was a language that court officials and novelists equally deployed to both secure and destabilize white wealth.

Drawing from critical race theory’s articulation of “the law’s role in producing social categories through discourse” (13), chapter 1, “This Most Illegal Family,” “explores the imaginative dimensions of [sic] interracial inheritance disputes” (21) by pairing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) and Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857) together with a landmark 1859 Mississippi case Mitchell v. Wells. Clymer’s project here is to illustrate the economic imperatives guiding the “legal” and “affective” family that extended into terms of racial belonging where, as he argues, the “trinity of whiteness, family, and nation then fuses into an exclusionary mechanism” (25). With both novels concerned with the psychological terrorism afflicted upon whites who wanted to manumit and transfer wealth to the slave women and children they “loved,” Clymer views the laws governing inheritance as the rewards for following legalized and enforced sexual practices (heterosexuality and anti-miscegenation). More than an abstracted structure of wealth management, Clymer opines that “inheritance is a social system of property distribution that reflects which sexual bonds a community deems economically worthy and unworthy” (25). Thus, as Clymer rightfully concludes, “the criminalization of interracial marriages and the strict limitations of family’s legal parameters should be understood as an economic policy as much as a racial strategy” (22...