In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a
vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave
neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their
owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses,
to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their
agents. In the course of cultivating family ties, forging alliances,
working, socializing, and storytelling, slaves fashioned their
neighborhoods into the locus of slave society.
Joining Places is the first book about slavery to use the pension
files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich
testimony by ex-slaves. From these detailed accounts, Kaye tells the
stories of men and women in love, "sweethearting," "taking up," "living
together," and marrying across plantation lines; striving to get right
with God; carving out neighborhoods as a terrain of struggle; and
working to overthrow the slaveholders' regime. Kaye's depiction of
slaves' sense of place in the Natchez District of Mississippi reveals a
slave society that comprised not a single, monolithic community but an
archipelago of many neighborhoods. Demonstrating that such neighborhoods
prevailed across the South, he reformulates ideas about slave marriage,
resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave
community that have defined decades of scholarship.
In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a
vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave
neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their
owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses,
to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their
agents. Demonstrating that neighborhoods prevailed across the South,
Kaye reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent
production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have
defined decades of scholarship. This is the first book about slavery to
use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast
source of rich testimony by ex-slaves.
