The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture

Libra R. Hilde

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469660684
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Analyzing published and archival oral histories of formerly enslaved African Americans, Libra R. Hilde explores the meanings of manhood and fatherhood during and after the era of slavery, demonstrating that black men and women articulated a surprisingly broad and consistent vision of paternal duty across more than a century. Complicating the tendency among historians to conflate masculinity within slavery with heroic resistance, Hilde emphasizes that, while some enslaved men openly rebelled, many chose subtle forms of resistance in the context of family and local community. She explains how a significant number of enslaved men served as caretakers to their children and shaped their lives and identities. From the standpoint of enslavers, this was particularly threatening--a man who fed his children built up the master's property, but a man who fed them notions of autonomy put cracks in the edifice of slavery. Fatherhood highlighted the agonizing contradictions of the condition of enslavement, and to be an involved father was to face intractable dilemmas, yet many men tried. By telling the story of the often quietly heroic efforts that enslaved men undertook to be fathers, Hilde reveals how formerly enslaved African Americans evaluated their fathers (including white fathers) and envisioned an honorable manhood.

CHAPTER ONE

The God Part of Him

Slavery and Constraints on Fatherhood

Leonard Black associated the abuse he suffered as a slave with being removed from parental protection. “Here I was, a poor slave boy, without father or mother to take my part,” he wrote.¹ Former slaves described the ways that slaveholders undermined and ruptured the slave family. Despite the constraints the institution placed on the formation of stable and enduring households, many enslaved people isolated from relatives realized what they lacked. They knew they had parents even if they had little personal contact with or distinct memory of their kin. Black also assumed that had his parents been near, they would have attempted to shelter him. Slaves and former slaves demonstrated an abiding understanding of the meaning of family even as they detailed impediments they faced and lamented their fragmented family ties.

Enslaved children frequently, but not always, had more sustained and longer contact with their mothers than their fathers. In an abroad marriage, children nearly always lived with their mothers and saw their fathers weekly or more infrequently. When separated by hiring or sale, children usually lost fathers earlier than and at higher rates than mothers, and because men absconded permanently more often than women, some lost their fathers to escape. When discussing family, former slaves viewed having two parents as ideal. To have one parent or the other was better than losing both. Having no memory of either parent due to early separation could lead to a sense of disconnection from one’s roots. Like Leonard Black, former slaves blamed the institution of slavery for limited contact with or permanent separation from their fathers, believing that these men would have been involved in their lives had they been able.

Enslaved parents endeavored to nurture their children in an atmosphere that enforced neglect and denied parental authority across a range of household structures. In this emasculating atmosphere, enslaved men struggled to fulfill their perceived duties as fathers, as paternity and any attempt to act as a caretaker forced men to confront the painful contradictions and intractable dilemmas of the slave condition. These men retained a sense of self, humanity, and manhood through love of family, religious faith, and a definition of honor that stood in stark contrast to their criticism of white paternity and paternalism.²

Broken Families and Constraints on Fatherhood

When ex-slaves remembered only one parent, they more often knew their mothers. Having little knowledge of, memory of, or contact with a father resulted from several factors, including sale, disrupted abroad marriages, sexual exploitation in various forms, escape, and death. Regional labor patterns and economic conditions meant that children in the Upper and Mountain South had a higher likelihood of growing up in a one-parent household and being permanently separated from family, especially fathers. White paternity of slaves and intentional breeding also increased the likelihood that a child would have limited or no contact with their father and increased the prevalence of fatherless households. Paul Escott found that 4.86 percent of twentieth-century slave narratives commented on forced breeding and 12.26 percent mentioned interracial sex, almost certainly an undercount.³ While the number of mixed-race people in the antebellum population varied regionally, and was higher in urban areas, these practices stemmed from slaveholder predilection and practices, leading to an uneven distribution across the landscape.

FWP interviews from across the South offered vague, incomplete information about unknown fathers that underscore the difficulty of accurately categorizing household composition and the reasons for family structure and disruption. At times, an enslaved mother purposely imparted no information about a child’s father, most often because he was white, but also because a small number of masters coerced unwanted relationships between slaves. “I never seen a father to know. I never heard mother say a thing about my father if I had one. He never was no use to me nor her neither,” John Patterson declared, shutting down this line of questioning. John Coggin had a similarly defensive response to a query about his family history: “I ain’t neber had no paw an’ I ain’t wanted none.” If a mother remained silent, her children grew up with no father, no idea of his identity, and no idea why he was missing. “Dar wasn’t no niggers much in slabery times whut knowed nothin’ ’bout dey pappys,” Henry Green insisted. “Us neber hab no pappy, jes er mammy.” Green contradicted his own statement about missing fathers when he discussed his maternal grandparents coming to collect his mother and her children after freedom and moving the entire family from southern Alabama to Arkansas. Green also related a story of having been born so light skinned that the mistress punished his mother, later apologizing when she felt she had been mistaken, indicating probable white parentage, one of the most common reasons for having little to no knowledge of a father.⁴ It is impossible to know if Patterson and Coggin had white fathers, but it is clear that a large number of missing fathers were white. When former slaves made blanket statements about slaves not knowing their fathers, they left records that could be used to assign blame to black men for problems created, in part, by white sexual exploitation. Furthermore, all three of these men suggested, but never specified, that their mothers presided over female-headed households. These were emotionally matrifocal families, but without further information, it is impossible to fully assess the composition of the households and to what degree that structure reflected choice or external pressure.

Children who received vague or calculated responses when they asked about their paternity grew up with and passed on incomplete family information. “I ain’t had no daddy case queens doan marry an’ my mammy, Junny, wuz a queen in Africa,” Ann Parker announced. “Dey would not talk to me ’bout who my father wus nor where he wus at,” Patsey Michener, also from North Carolina, added. “Mother would laf sometime when I axed her ’bout him.” These individuals may have had white fathers, but they either did not know for sure or deliberately withheld that information from their interviewers. When Michener’s mother and siblings were sold away, she lost contact with the person who could verify her father’s identity. Ryer Emmanuel’s cautionary tale about how one “yellow” girl among the “heap of black chillun” on her Marion County, South Carolina, plantation provoked the wrath of the mistress speaks to the risks of revealing white paternity to young children. The mistress asked the girl who her father was, and the child, unaware of the consequences, repeated the name provided by her mother, leading to hostile treatment and distress for mother and child. The mother darkened her daughter’s skin “wid smut, but she couldn’ never trouble dat straight hair off her noway.” Visible markers of white parentage might cause speculation and rumors, whereas concrete acknowledgment could be dangerous. Withholding information about paternity enabled mothers to protect themselves and their children and/or to cope with the trauma of sexual exploitation.⁵

The sexual dynamics of slavery and individual slaveholder behavior thus contributed to an indistinct and unevenly distributed number of fatherless families. These families were fatherless in actuality and often fatherless in memory. When enslaved and formerly enslaved mothers withheld information about paternity, some fraction likely did so strategically to protect themselves and their children. The FWP subjects, moreover, sometimes genuinely did not know the identity of their father or they echoed their mothers in suppressing that information, a continuing strategy of self-preservation. This further complicates the efforts to quantify the percentage of mixed-race people, and shows how sexual exploitation complicates efforts to categorize the enslaved family.

Slaveholder control of marriage and imposed mating systems on certain plantations also influenced family structures and limited father/child interaction. Mack Brantley only saw his father a few times and referred to himself as a “stole child” because his mother had a husband assigned by her master and was not “supposen to have children by my pa,” who lived on a neighboring Alabama plantation. Other children knew only that their fathers lived on the plantation or nearby. On Mary Ingram’s Louisiana plantation, men and women selected as breeders were not allowed to marry and their children “don’ know any father.” Ingram knew the identity of and had seen her father, who lived on an adjacent farm, but she had no substantive contact or relationship with him because he and her mother had been used as breeders and temporarily and forcibly paired. Ryer Emmanuel, enslaved in the Pee Dee region of South Carolina, indicated that individual slaveholder practices sometimes led to female-headed households. “We chillun used to ax us mammy whe’ us come from en she say, ‘I got you out de hollow log.’ Well, just like I tell you, slavery chillun had dey daddy somewhe’ on de plantation. Cose dey had a daddy, but dey didn’ have no daddy stayin in de house wid dem,” she related. “White folks would make you take dat man whe’ if you want him or no. Us chillun never didn’ know who us daddy been till us mammy point him out cause all us went in Massa Anthony Ross’ name. Yes, mam, all us had a different daddy, so my mammy say.”⁶ Masters who engaged in forced pairing or breeding and who denied slaves choice in partners fueled the formation of emotionally matrifocal families and undermined the development of relationships and households that facilitated connections between fathers and children.

As Jeff Forret notes, masters who forcibly paired slaves for breeding purposes also contributed to disharmony in the quarters, “creating a breeding ground for domestic abuse.”⁷ Rose Williams, auctioned off in 1860, felt fortunate to be purchased along with her parents. Her father intervened with a potential buyer asking him to keep the family together, and this slaveholder decided Williams would serve well as a breeder. About a year later, when she was roughly sixteen years old, Rose’s master placed her in the cabin of a slave named Rufus. After initially rejecting and fighting him off, she eventually acceded to the relationship when reminded of the purpose for which she had been purchased and threatened with separation from her parents. While it is impossible to know Rufus’s feelings and motivations in this situation, David Doddington emphasizes Rose’s description of Rufus as a “bully,” and as an enslaved man “who expected his dominance to extend across the plantation.” He points out that Rose believed Rufus favored the relationship, indicating that though the pairing was ordered by the master, Rufus may have colluded in this decision. Rufus may have feared punishment, and Thomas Foster uses the narrative as example of the sexual exploitation of men.⁸ After freedom, Rose forced Rufus to leave and remained with her parents until they died. She never had another intimate relationship with a man. “De Lawd fo’give dis cullud woman,” she finished her interview, “but he have to ’scuse me and look fo’ some udder persons fo’ to ’plemish de earth.”⁹ Completely lost in this discussion are Rose and Rufus’s two children. Rose never talked about her children, and their presence is only discernable in the opening notes to the interview. The child born after freedom likely never knew a father. It is possible Rose was an attentive and loving mother, with her own parents serving as a positive model. However, it is reasonable to speculate about how her antipathy for Rufus affected her feelings toward her children. In addition, when Rose drove Rufus away after emancipation, she probably severed his contact with his children, something he may or may not have regretted. While much in this story remains elusive, one thing is clear—imposed management practices at times created two-parent households that did not emotionally function as cohesive families. Those decisions affected intimate relationships and parenting. Slaveholders forcibly created two-parent households just as they prevented the formation of others.¹⁰

Masters who dictated pairings to maximize reproduction adhered to a rough approximation of serial monogamy with sequential partners, while a few demanded that slaves take several concurrent partners. Some masters used men as studs, pairing them with multiple women and hiring them out to neighboring farms as breeders. Daina Berry argues that breeding created an enforced promiscuity that has been mislabeled as polygamy.¹¹ Whereas Berry and Thomas Foster see forced pairing and breeding as sexual abuse of women and men, David Doddington suggests that not all enslaved men saw themselves as victims in these situations, another example of varied responses to the oppression of slavery. He argues that many enslaved men conceived of intimate relationships through the lens of patriarchy and shared with white men a belief in male dominance over women. “The agency of black women could thus be limited by enslavers and enslaved men,” Doddington writes.¹²

As Doddington shows, some enslaved men used sex to dominate men as well as women. Their children were likely to speak positively of these men if such behavior did not destabilize the informant’s own family unit. Frank Adamson’s father would not allow other enslaved men near his wife: “He sho’ was a man; he run all de other niggers ’way from my mammy and took up wid her widout askin’ de marster.” Doddington uses this example to demonstrate masculine identity based on “supremacy over rivals.”¹³ Adamson clearly celebrated his father’s manliness, but he linked it to defiance of the master as much as a position atop the hierarchy of enslaved men. For Adamson, to be a man meant resisting the master’s authority and choosing and defending his own partner. That defiance, however, might come at the expense of enslaved women, who faced the control of master and husband. Adamson’s family remained intact and was headed by his father after the war, and he lauded his father’s sexual autonomy within the context of what appears to have been a monogamous marriage that worked to his benefit.

Doddington shows that men used as breeders sometimes exhibited a sense of pride and superiority. Here he uses the example of Jeptha Choice. Choice bragged about his physical attributes and the fact that being “in much demand for breedin’ ” meant lighter work and better treatment. Doddington argues that this admiring attitude, “implies a belief that sexually prolific men, even those outside of or alienated from community and kin, were not considered powerless or emasculated victims. Instead, these men embodied a particular type of manhood based on virility and dominance.” He omits the fact that Choice then added, “later on we good strong niggers was ’lowed to marry” and jumping the broom in the presence of the master “married ’em for good.”¹⁴ Choice was not entirely clear, but he suggested that these men moved from unmarried breeder status to married, possibly with a single partner. Enslaved people often applauded sexual virility and accorded status to these men. However, it appears that they might also see this as a stage rather than a fixed or exclusive identity. I agree with Doddington’s definition of sexual prowess as one of several masculine identities available to enslaved men, but I disagree that it meant a rejection of the provider and protector role.¹⁵ Younger men who derived a masculine identity from sexual prowess might later choose (or not) to take on another masculine identity or they might merge identities and roles. Human beings are, after all, multidimensional.

FWP informants were more likely to speak admiringly of male sexual prowess if they were themselves male and if removed from or not overly adversely impacted by such sexual exploitation. Rias Body discussed several “stud bucks,” including his older brothers, the “envy” of weaker men not chosen for such privileges, and competition among these men to see who could father the most children in a year.¹⁶ Body was not talking about his own father, and born in 1846, and thus fifteen when the war began, he was probably still a shade too young to take on this role himself, but also at an age when the idea might hold some allure and shape his memories of slavery. More often, inf...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The God Part of Him: Slavery and Constraints on Fatherhood
• Chapter Two: I Liked My Papa the Best: Enslaved Fathers
• Chapter Three: Blasphemous Doctrine for a Slave to Teach: Provisioning
• Chapter Four: This Great Object of My Life: Purchase and Escape
• Chapter Five: Tuckey Buzzard Lay Me: Slavery, Sex, and White Fathers
• Chapter Six: Mortifications Peculiarly Their Own: Rape, Concubinage, and White Paternity
• Chapter Seven: My Children Is My Own: Fatherhood and Freedom
• Chapter Eight: Good to Us Chillun: Provisioning in Freedom
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index