Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South

by Anthony E. Kaye

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.

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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.
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Genres: History

365 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Ian Gere · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Neighborhoods encompassed the bonds of kinship, the practice of Christianity, the geography of sociability, the terrain of struggle. For slaves, neighborhoods served as the locus of all the bonds that shaped the contours of their society.”

This was a great interpretation of how enslaved people understood space, and subsequent social relationships among adjoining plantations, in the antebellum South. However, Kaye takes the information of the pension files at face value, so his argument loses stamina throughout the text. I did enjoy his chapter on slaves’ conception of freedom at the beginning of the Civil War and how slave neighborhoods were integral in disseminating information that slaves used to understand what freedom meant/would mean.

[Megan Mcgee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting analysis on the formation and importance of slave neighborhoods in Natchez, Mississippi. Relationships, intimate and business, arose in slave neighborhoods despite the plantation boundary. Neighborhoods were exact yet fluid. Use of the pension records as sources instead of WPA allowed Kaye to get closer to the time.

[John Jung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enlightening analysis of the daily trials and tribulations that slaved faced and explanation of how they managed to function as a community despite their limited control. Made me think about issues that I've not seen discussed in broader discussions of life for slavss

[Mills College Library]

307.3362 K234 2007