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  • My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South by Sergio A. Lussana
  • Bret E. Carroll (bio)
My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South. By Sergio A. Lussana. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Pp. 225. Cloth, $50.00.)

Lewis Clarke famously proclaimed in 1842 that "a slave can't be a man!" and, until recently, most scholars who commented on slave masculinity seemed to agree. But focused studies of manhood among the enslaved, while still few and very recent, are challenging simplistic generalizations that slavery was a profoundly emasculating experience and that heroic resistance was the only way for a slave to assert manliness. Fortified by the growth of masculinity studies and a growing body of research on women in slavery, historians are widening their conceptualizations of slave manhood beyond family life and violent resistance and combing the evidence in search of male slaves' inner and everyday lives. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, for example, attempts in an 1988 issue of the American Historical Review to peek behind the "mask of obedience" and sketch out a framework for considering male slave psychology; Edward Baptist's essay in the anthology Southern Manhood (2004) calls attention to both caretaking and frankly antisocial behaviors among enslaved men; and, in what had been until now the only book-length examination of slave manhood in the United States, Kenneth Marshall seeks in Manhood Enslaved (2011) to tease out from whites' writings a sense of the male identities and emotional states that lay behind the masks whites saw.1

Sergio Lussana, who has himself contributed a few articles to this budding literature, now offers a welcome full-length, if brief, study of friendships among enslaved men. Like sociologist and masculinities theorist Michael Kimmel, Lussana argues that it is in homosocial rather than heterosocial settings that men establish their male status and identity. Lussana also, like so many other historians of manhood and masculinity, builds on crucial insights provided by women's historians. In particular, Deborah Gray White's idea of a "female slave network" and the late Stephanie Camp's concept of "everyday resistance" frame his argument that friendships among enslaved men fostered an all-male subculture that both softened and facilitated resistance to the brutalities of slavery.2

Drawing on evidence from oral slave testimonies, published slave narratives, and slave folklore, as well as on plantation records, trial records, and the insights of anthropologists and sociologists, Lussana makes his argument in five chapters. Because the homosocial world of enslaved men was "born in the workplace" (20)—the southern industries, mines, infrastructure projects, artisanal workshops, and sex-segregated labor fields [End Page 653] populated largely by men—the opening chapter examines that male space. Here, bondsmen fashioned masculine identities not only by acting as providers for their families and in some cases passing skills to their sons but also by building bonds of cooperation, interdependence, and trust. The second chapter turns to leisure activities. Drinking, fighting, and gambling together, often at night and outside whites' oversight, enslaved men reclaimed their bodies and contested slave owners' power. In these activities, above all, we see the "everyday battles these men fought for control over their lives" (45).

Lussana sees even more subversive possibilities in male slaves' activities outside the plantation—including hunting, evasion of slave patrols, and cross-plantation theft—and the general pattern of routine male mobility that encouraged them. Hunting and theft served male-provider functions, but these risk-taking behaviors also, Lussana argues in chapter 3, allowed bondsmen to defy slave owners' temporal and spatial control, prove their masculinity to one another, enhance status and ties of trust, and form covert alliances. The book's fourth chapter focuses on friendship, particularly its conspiratorial possibilities. As vehicles for planning escapes and aiding runaways—most of whom were men—male friendship networks, like those among women, fostered a culture oppositional to slavery and linked slaves' personal and everyday lives to radical public and political actions. Finally, the closing chapter explains the "grapevine telegraph." Facilitated by slave men's mobility and the trust fostered among them by their various homosocial activities, this secret and largely male communication system constituted a "pivotal...

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