The Accidental Slaveowner: Revisiting a Myth of Race and Finding an American Family

2. Distant Kin: Slavery and Cultural Intimacy in a Georgia Community

Chapter Two Distant Kin Slavery and Cultural Intimacy in a Georgia Community M ythology, as Lévi-Strauss argues, is often generated out of the most enigmatic tensions and contradictions of a social system. For over two centuries, North American chattel slavery, which posed so many fundamental conundrums about personhood , relatedness, and the contours of human freedom and constraint, was highly productive of mythological renderings in white and African American imaginings. Although we might discern “family resemblances” among these many popular narratives, many of their specific details were produced out of local specificities in regimes of coerced labor. The vast plantations of Mississippi helped to generate the mythological renderings of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, just as the hardscrabble small holdings of Kentucky helped inspire the portraits of intimate violence immortalized in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Before exploring in detail how the myth of Kitty developed and transformed over time, it is thus helpful to sketch out the milieu in which this deeply resonant narrative emerged—that is to say, the social matrix of slavery in Oxford and Newton County before the Civil War. This historical case study is not universally applicable to all instances of slavery in the antebellum South, but it does call attention to how intimately intertwined chattel slave ownership was with the overall operations of kinship and descent on both sides of the color line in the wider region. In important respects, slavery functioned as an overarching system organizing social relations within and among white and African American family networks. In order to navigate local social landscapes, free and enslaved actors both needed to be acutely aware of genealogical relations that cut across lines of race, social class, and ownership status. Many enslaved persons tangibly embodied a complex social “map” of white kinship and Distant Kin 41 descent relations, a map that would largely condition their trajectories and life possibilities. Such was dramatically the case with the enslaved persons owned or controlled by James Andrew from the 1830s until emancipation in 1865; each carried, in effect, an intricate microhistory of legal and descent transactions that were often perplexing to external observers, but which were of vital importance to slaveowners and the enslaved alike. Enslaved people were critical at many levels to the overall project of white social reproduction in the antebellum South. In a material sense, of course, their extracted labor power undergirded the domestic and externally oriented economies of white slaveholding households. At more subtle cultural or ideological levels, slaves functioned as what structural anthropologists have termed “symbolic operators”; they bound together white families, intensifying bonds created through marriage, parenthood , and common descent. To be sure, even when enslaved persons were biogenetic relations of their white masters, they were rarely treated as full kin. Yet they were what might be termed “distant kin,” profoundly enmeshed in the intricate social and legal reckonings of antebellum kinship calculus. As dowry gifts, living exchange objects, nurturers, and sentient holders of family memory, enslaved persons actively helped to create white families and white kinship relations. At the same time, the enslaved often bore the brunt of structural tensions and crises in white gender, sexual, and familial relations. These observations echo in significant respects Lévi-Strauss’s discussions of the position of women in his foundational study The Elementary Structures of Kinship. In terms of the overall structure of human kinship and descent systems, women may be regarded as foundational exchange objects out of which a social structure is constituted. Through the organized exchange of women between men, male-dominated social units come into being, assume definition in relation to one another, and reproduce themselves over time. In these important respects, women function as “objects” in relation to an overall system of social relations, even though, as Lévi-Strauss freely acknowledges, actual women possess existence in and of themselves as conscious, sentient agents in the world.1 A similar doubled existence characterized the existential predicament of enslaved persons within the antebellum family networks explored in this study. As units or tokens of commercial and familial exchange, slaves were clearly rendered objects, manipulated pawns and objects of desire on the greater chessboard of white kinship and descent. Yet even under 42 ch ap ter t wo the harshest and most coercive of historical conditions, enslaved persons were possessed of degrees of agency and sentient intentionality. In significant instances, the enslaved were at times able to influence the overall...