“Little Boats” in the Storm: Racial Ambiguity and Gender in Two Postemancipation Adoptions

Exactly what transgression Mary Ann Lamb committed is unknown, but her adoptive parents, Loren and Nancy Thompson, considered them serious things “which we had to reprove her for.” Lamb, a young black woman of “about 20,” had visited the city of Kingston, Jamaica, to bid the Thompsons farewell as they departed for their native home in the United States (Thompson 1858b). They left her behind and did not return for more than a year. Perhaps the Thompsons caught Lamb “drinking rum with friends.” Perhaps she flirted. Or perhaps she “rebuked the Thompsons for leaving her” (Kenny 2010, 192). Whatever she did, it clearly contravened the gendered etiquette by which the Thompsons, white emissaries of the American Missionary Association in postemancipation Jamaica, lived and that they sought to cultivate among their congregants.

In 1875, another daughter rebelled. Writing to her guardian, the radical Republican “carpetbagger” Albion Tourgée, nineteen-year-old Adaline Pattillo announced her intention to withdraw from the Hampton Institute, where she had been enrolled for four years. She would instead return to Yanceyville, North Carolina, where her biological mother, Louisa, and sister, Mary, remained. Motivated by guilt and loyalty, Pattillo had decided to devote her time to them. Tourgée had envisioned a very different path for Ada, as he called her. Although Pattillo was born a slave, Tourgée expected that formal education would provide middle-class respectability, and perhaps a limited, gender-appropriate public role, joining white reformers in “uplifting the race” (Elliott 2006). Tourgée had moved Pattillo into his North Carolina home in 1869, directed his wife, Emma, to educate her, and sent her to Hampton, with this result in mind (Elliott 2006; Woods 2013). Pattillo had other plans for both herself and her blood relatives. “I do want,” she stressed with an underline, in an unequivocal expression of insistence, “a home of our own & I will not feel content until I get one” (Pattillo 1875).

Although separated by seventeen years and nearly two thousand miles, these two acts of rebellion reveal what was possibly a common outcome of transracial adoption in postemancipation societies. Historically, the family has been a primary site in which the racial and gender ideologies of its members, including children, are formed. The phenomenon holds true for the end of slavery in the Anglophone Atlantic (Scully and Paton 2005). Concepts of race in the nineteenth century partly relied on the notion that “the filiation of individuals transmits from generation to generation a substance both biological and spiritual and thereby inscribes them in a temporal community known as ‘kinship’” (Balibar 1991, 100). Thus, the disruption of this “genealogical scheme” by the transfer of nonwhite subjects from black households to those of white reformers raises questions concerning how the racial and gender subjectivities of freedchildren were affected.¹ Transracial adoptees lived on the cusp of two families, included fully in neither. By examining these arrangements from the perspectives of children, adopters, and, where sources allow, biological mothers who sought to reclaim their offspring, the present essay will show that the result for the children in question manifested in conflicted identities and an ambiguous sense of place within race and gender categories.

The early decades of freedom provide fruitful sites of examination for these phenomena. Before emancipation, abolitionists frequently criticized the effects of bondage on enslaved families (Dixon 1997) but had little to no power to directly intervene. Slavery’s demise provided reformers like the Tourgées and Thompsons a degree of access to governance of black children that property rights of slaveholders had hitherto largely prevented. Moreover, the adoptions occurred when racial hierarchies that many had once assumed stable were undone. Transracial adoption, Mark Jerng argues, was most common when “national traumas focused on the formation of … citizenry and the question of national and racial belonging” (2010, xii). In such moments, when the power of law and custom to define “black as slave and white as master” was undermined (Rugemer 2008, 18), racial identities were increasingly destabilized.

Making Adoption Arrangements

Loren and Nancy Thompson arrived in Jamaica in 1844.^2...