Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South (review)

Anthony Kaye’s Joining Places opens with a vignette detailing how John Wade, an enslaved man, formed friendships within his neighborhood, which spread across plantation boundaries. This opening, just as the book on a whole, focuses on enslaved people’s encounters with the geographical and social terrains of Mississippi’s Natchez district, often told through their own voices. Kaye mines plantation accounts, county records, the Southern Claims Commission, Works Progress Administration interviews, and the Civil War Pension Files, to reveal how slaves worked, loved, prayed, and struggled together within the closely connected spaces of adjoining plantations. Looking to how enslaved men and women described the contours of their relationships and labor within these rich sources, Kaye uncovers the complicated and contested boundaries to the slaves’ economic and social lives, challenging the scholarship to stretch to fit African American’s conceptions of space and community, rather than those defined by white owners and politicians. Writing against the “anachronistic liberal framework” of community and autonomy studies, which Kaye sees homogenizing historical representations of power and resistance, Joining Places develops the concept of the neighborhood to reveal the unintentional, constrained, and internally contested fabric of slaves’ lives in the Natchez district, which ebbed and flowed between plantations’ bounds (9).

To show how slaves’ relationships, both with each other and Mississippi’s white classes, created neighborhoods, and in turn how these spaces contained and shaped their interactions, Kaye revolves his analysis around three main categories: intimate relations, divisions of labor, and terrains of struggle. Joining Places contributes meaningful nuance to descriptions of slaves’ families, courtships, and marriages in the years preceding the Civil War. Describing how slaves’ geographical bounds were limited, Kaye shows the dense interpersonal relations that arose between neighboring plantations. As men and women loved and traveled between adjoining plantations, they constituted an informal but closely protected space wherein they defined a continuum of intimacy, ranging from sweethearting and taking-up to living together and marriage. Slaves engaged and supervised each other, while strategically calling on slave owners within and beyond their immediate plantation to protect their relationships. These accounts underscore the multiple power dynamics that shaped the terrain of life and love. When reconstructing labor practices, Kaye reiterates familiar ground—the divisions of labor between the field and the house, the significance of auxiliary production and agricultural cycles, and the broader ranges that men’s labor granted them beyond the plantation. However, in describing how adjoining plantations shared labor, Kaye illustrates the entangled threads that bound slaves together within networks of plantations. The byproduct of these connections, Kaye shows, was an inclusive sense of place that projected suspicion upon outsiders, stymieing and regulating attempts at running away and wide-scale violence in order to protect the immediate neighborhood from retribution. Kaye’s intervention in the study of slave resistance goes beyond questions of trust and the barriers to revolution. Slaves in joining plantations cooperated to draw attention to abuses. Joining Places explores these joint efforts to reveal how the interconnected landscape of neighboring plantations played an integral role in men’s and women’s navigation and contestation of the boundaries of their enslavement. The final portion of the book considers slaves’ engagement of the spaces “Beyond Neighborhood”—considering how travel, religion, hiring out, and encounters with the law extended slaves’ sense of the region. Concluding with a discussion of the Civil War and emancipation, Kaye pushes his analysis of place to see how it influenced slaves’ understanding of the war and their definitions of freedom.

Kaye convincingly shows how the social and physical landscapes of the neighborhood infused the relationships, labor, and struggles that defined slaves’ lives in Mississippi and beyond. However, in reading the dynamic sources, many of the most evocative penned after emancipation, it seems curious that Kaye did not also consider how neighborhood infused the memories of the formerly...