Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America by Sharony Green (review)

Cincinnati, located in the free state of Ohio but on the border of slave state Kentucky, played an important role in the history of slavery and abolitionism. The city often served as “way station” where “recently freed people assessed their options” (4). This transitional nature allowed it to be an ideal home for freedwomen supported by their former masters. These relationships are the focus of Sharony Green’s first book, Remember Me to Miss Louisa. Centering primarily on the relationship between Rice Ballard and his former slave Avenia White, who lived in Cincinnati, and Louisa Picquet, as a model of former enslaved women who had relations with white men, Green seeks to complicate our understanding of black-white relationships in the antebellum United States. She sees the women in these relationships emerging “as both victors and victims, immoral and upright, enslaved and indeed free with white men’s help” (132). Green argues that “intimacy” between white men and their slaves was complicated and some of these white slave-owning men who “loved” enslaved women acted to help these women and their children survive the challenges of slavery and racism in the years surrounding the Civil War (2).

Green uses a variety of sources to facilitate an understanding of intimate cross-racial relationships largely hidden from the public: correspondence, diaries, news reports, and government records. She acknowledges the weaknesses in her sources. There is a lack of material created by people of color, particularly women and children. Similarly, white male slaveowners had much to lose if their support of freedwomen was revealed. Because of these constraints, Green uses the few voices available in the source material to represent a presumably larger contingent of likeminded people. However, this weakens her conclusions, particularly on the claim of autonomy for these freedwomen who had to rely on their former masters for funds to pay their rent and feed their children. Are they truly choosing intimate relationships with these men, when so few options were available to them? Due to a lack of source material, Green’s intriguing argument that these women could choose between paths is left unsupported. Future research might build upon her work by looking at additional sources such as court records for evidence of these relationships.

Green complicates many concepts we might have previously taken for granted. For example, she moves the act of freeing one’s slave(s) from a charitable gesture to “unveiling the inconsistencies in human behavior” (5). She properly asserts that people do not simply act in a way that makes the most sense to their position in life but are influenced and pulled in directions that often lead to confusing conclusions. And she rightly demonstrates that consensual action was not always possible for the enslaved woman and there was always a level of oppression present. Green is careful not to call the emotion between the slaveowner and his female slave (or former slave) “love” but rather a “kind of connection, even if it was accompanied with a seemingly delusional utterance of love” (2). This type of complexity is appreciated, but the argument that the benefits of such relationships outweighed the oppression is unconvincing. Her evidence, particularly of Ballard and White, does make a strong example, but it is not enough to claim widespread representation of other similar relationships. Alternatively, when Green introduces children to her study, she strengthens her argument that these interracial relationships often had contradictory outcomes. She writes that the children of white men and black women “could be enslaved and create wealth but also serve as sexual partners and companions who exchanged sex for subsistence, education, and freedom for themselves” (94). Children provide the best example of the “messiness” found is these relationships; they offer future labor, companionship, and a patriarchal legacy that might have resulted in pride but publicly had to be kept hidden (127).

Green...