The legacy of the slave family haunts the status of black Americans in modern U.S. society. Stereotypes that first entered the popular imagination in the form of plantation lore have continued to distort the African American social identity. In What Sorrows Labour in My Parents' Breast?, Brenda Stevenson provides a long overdue concise history to help the reader understand this vitally important African American institution as it evolved and survived under the extreme opposition that the institution of slavery imposed. The themes of this work center on the multifaceted reality of loss, recovery, resilience and resistance embedded in the desire of African/African descended people to experience family life despite their enslavement. These themes look back to the critical loss that Africans, both those taken and those who remained, endured, as the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley honors in the line-"What sorrows labour in my parents' breast?," and look forward to the generations of slaves born through the Civil War era who struggled to realize their humanity in the recreation of family ties that tied them, through blood and emotion, to a reality beyond their legal bondage to masters and mistresses. Stevenson pays particular attention to the ways in which gender, generation, location, slave labor, the economic status of slaveholders and slave societies' laws affected the black family in slavery.
Brenda Stevenson, professor of history at UCLA, is senior editor of the three volume Encyclopedia of Black Women in America (2005), a 2005 Choice Outstanding Academic title, and several books in African American history, including Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (1996), winner of the 1997 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Prize for the Study of Human Rights in North America, and The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots (2013) winner of the OAH 2014 James A. Rawley Prize as Best Book on History of Race Relations for 2013.
Introduction: The Black Family in the Public Imagination: What's Slavery and Slavery Scholarship Got to Do with It? Beginnings Chapter One: Traditions from Whence They Came: Marriage and Family in Western/Central Africa at the Time of the Atlantic Slave Trade Chapter Two: The Colonial Slave Family: Foundations and Creations Chapter Three: Traditions of Resistance and Family The Antebellum Familial Experience Chapter Four: Antebellum Courtship and Marital Rituals Chapter Five: Antebellum Family Life Chapter Six: Death and Resurrection Conclusion: Bob Samuels' American Family
