The Play Practices ofEnslaved Children•
Shakeel A. Harris

The author examines the childhood experiences of formerly enslaved children. He suggests that the conventional understandings of scholars and historians concerning play may not be applicable to the complex lives of enslaved
children because researchers do not consider such children as always propertied beings. Their play practices were molded by their proximity to violenceand by their being owned as property. Rethinking what constitutes playfor enslaved children, Harris asserts, unlocks newer possibilities for understanding the behaviors, actions, and desires of these children. Their playpractices allowed them to learn about—and challenge—their place in theworld. Building on and challenging seminal scholarship, Harris encourages
readers to rethink what constitutes play and to view ordinary forms of play
as intentional attacks against the institution of slavery and white supremacy.
Key words: enslaved children and play; slavery and play; white gaze

In 1851 South Carolina slaveholder Gabriel Plowden gave his wife a spe-cial gift—a five-year-old enslaved boy named Titus Bynes. Plowden desired hiswife to have someone she could groom into a reliable personal servant. Bynes,
a sharp little boy with a searing desire to acquire knowledge, soon began tosneak glances at the various newspapers his owners read. The awesome words
and images he encountered in this forbidden world inspired the little houseboy.
One day, as Bynes was playing in the dirt and writing out various words andletters he had observed, one of the Plowden daughters caught him writing aboutwater, and she swiftly ran off to tell her mother. The plantation mistress sternly
chastised Bynes and warned him that, if he were ever caught writing again, shewould be sure to have his right arm sawed off. After this encounter, the young
boy never openly played games with words.1
This incident captures the complexities and risks associated with theenslaved child’s play. When young Bynes first encountered words, he wasrestricted. He could go only so far, because it was illegal in all slaveholding states
for enslaved people to read and write. The excitement of breaking oppressive
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American Journal of Play, volume 13, numbers 2 and 3 © The Strong
Contact Shakeel A. Harris at shar138@lsu.edu

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rules and the internal desire to learn spurred Byne’s disobedience and metamorphosed into a playful game with an important lesson: Byne would never playwith words in front of his owners again.
Before continuing, let me clarify my definition of play. I define enslaved
child’s play as any bodily action, gesture, or decision enacted by the enslaved
child with the intent of generating behavioral, social, intellectual, or physicalrewards. Historian Howard Chudacoff ’s definition of play as an array of “amusing activities that have behavioral, social, intellectual, and physical rewards”
offers a helpful starting point, but I hope to extend his definition beyond therealm of the amusing.2 Here, I incorporate the work of play scholar Thomas
Henricks. His seminal essay, “Play as Self-Realization: Toward a General Theory
of Play,” provides a tenable framework for rethinking the boundaries of play.
Henricks suggests that all forms of play are “project[s] of self-realization.”3 When
players engage in play, they do so to “acquaint themselves with the character ofthe world in which they operate and to evaluate the personal standings they canachieve within that world.”4 When enslaved children engaged in play throughmore recognizable modes of games and leisure activities or less relaxed social
interactions with white owners and civilians, these children were gauging theirpotential and capabilities as slaves. They learned what was acceptable, inappropriate, prohibited, and dangerous to their persons as Black enslaved beings. The
actions, gestures, and decisions of enslaved children, ranging from the leisurely
and recreational to the required, therefore, aided their navigation through life
as property while simultaneously allowing them to critique their chattel status
and create new possibilities of existence. Enslaved children’s daily experiences
constituted various modes of play in and of themselves. To be sure, these young
people played in the conventional sense. They ran, fought, raced, and chased eachother as well as some of their white counterparts, but, even then, they always
hoped for some sort of reward or benefit. When the play practices of enslaved
children threatened the authority of their masters—and, thereby, the authority of the planter class—the system often responded against the enslaved withviolence. Notwithstanding this looming threat of violence and displacement,
enslaved children continued to play.

Rethinking PlayTo relate better to the life experiences of enslaved children, I find it helpful to

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establish a broader, more unconventional concept of play, one that surpasses
the enjoyable and pleasurable and takes into consideration the human desire
for self-preservation and the reality of slave life as unpredictable and invasive.
Sociologist Orlando Patterson has argued that enslaved people of all ages were“socially dead” and that this social death constituted being “alienated from all‘rights’ or claims of births.”5 The children of slavery were birthed into a systemof alienation and obligation. Due to social, cultural, and legal measures, slaveholders wielded authority “derived from [their] control over symbolic instruments, which effectively persuaded both slaves and others that the master was
the only mediator between the living community to which [the slave owners]
belonged” and their socially dead slaves.6 Enslaved American children came ofage in a world in which their greatest purpose was to satisfy the will of those
who owned them. Enslaved children’s quest for self-development was buffeted
by their limited legal and social mobility. The enslaved could not legally read,
write, or travel freely without the consent of white masters. When Black people(free or enslaved) traveled, if patrollers found them without an authorized travel
pass, they would often be punished.
Nevertheless, enslaved children contested their social and legal status bychallenging and critiquing their slave status through a variety of games. Enslaved
child’s play amounted to more than pleasurable or recreational games. Without
question, enslaved child’s play did include moments of leisure, and I discuss
some of the conventional game experiences of enslaved children. Notwithstanding this reality, I encourage a rethinking of what constitutes play and gaming.
Many of the daily activities of enslaved children (staying out of trouble, getting
into trouble, performing menial tasks) can be read as gaming opportunities
the enslaved used to grapple with their slave status and sought to receive some
sort of reward because of their behavior. When Titus Bynes leisurely wrote in
the dirt, he participated in a game that levied a negative reward—the threat ofdismemberment. Writing words on the ground in a society where writing words
could get you cut (or killed) constituted a rebellious game.
Building on this concept, I use the life experiences of enslaved children toargue that the play practices of these youngsters ranged from leisurely gameswith white children and fellow slaves to spontaneous (or coerced) performancesat the behest of their owners and other whites. For enslaved children, performing
mundane tasks and appeasing white masters, drivers, overseers, and civilians
became a game.
Anthropologists John Roberts, Malcolm Arth, and Robert Bush haveThe Play Practices of Enslaved Childrenclassified games into three broad categories: games of physical skill, strategy,
and chance.7 Games of physical skill required some sort of standout competency
within the physical body. Games of strategy necessitated the successful executionof a plan regardless of physical skill. And games of chance occurred in instanceswhere the physical and the strategic had no bearing on the game’s outcome. This
performance may not have always brought pleasure to the enslaved, but it didlessen the possibility of bodily harm and white ridicule. The reward for carryingout the master’s desires could equate to a decreased threat of physical harm, agreater assurance of family members not being sold off (or that they would besold off together), and even small gifts that enslaved children self-appraised withvalue and meaning. This is not to say that every moment of an enslaved child’s
play was dedicated to the master’s happiness. On the contrary, much scholarshiphighlights how the enslaved contested slavery.8 I view the very act of enslaved
humans finding personal joy and fulfillment in whatever space, place, or moment
they occupy to be the ultimate critique against the institution of slavery.
Now, let the games begin.

Enslaved Child’s Play
Enslaved children who grew up living under their master’s roof were more likely
to play recreational games with white children, but here they also came into theknowledge of their racialized difference. Harriett Gresham grew up as a mixedrace, South Carolina slave. Her mother was the seamstress of the plantation.
Due to her mother’s exalted job, she and Harriet lived in the big house with
their master. The child enjoyed the company of her master’s children, but theexternal reality of her enslavement—and the inferior status it attached to her—followed Harriet like an omnipresent shadow. She described her recreational
upbringing like this: “Honey, I aint know I was any different fum de chillen o’ me
mistress. . . . We played and et [ate] and fit [fought] togetter lak chillen is boundter do all over der world. [However,] Somethin’ allus [always] happened though
to remind me dat I was jist a piece of property.”9Greshom, despite her nearness to the master’s children and her sharing
moments of intimate play with them, felt she was treated more like a piece ofproperty than a human being. Many of the interracial games between Black
enslaved youths and white children, according to Chudacoff, were tools of socialization designed to prepare Black children for adult life as slaves. I argue that,

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although these games may have “reproduced prevailing racial hierach[ies],”enslaved Black childrens’ play experiences with white children also functioned
as the breeding grounds for rejecting these hierarchies and challenging white
supremacy.10
Former Georgia slave Easter Brown was just four years old at the end of the
Civil War. When she was still a small child, the plantation mistress gave Eastervarious tasks like helping the house cook, Louisa. Brown was also playmate to
the mistress’s infant daughter. While the baby girl was cared for and given thebest toys, Brown was forced to create and play with a doll she made with an oldtree branch and a discarded rag.11 Brown was determined to have a toy with orwithout her master’s consent or aid.
Former Mississippi slave Hamp Simmons recollected traveling with hismaster’s son as a small boy and “going out with one of master’s sons and catchingbirds under a trap and cooking them in the field.” While this may have been oneof the highlights of Simmons’s childhood, he could also remember coming backfrom these fields barefoot with only a long shirt for clothing while his playmate
played fully clothed.12
Gresham, Brown, and Simmons grew up as house slaves. Their placement
within the home of their masters afforded them unique experiences that differentiated them from their enslaved peers who lived and played mostly among
other slaves. Where enslaved children slept may have affected their day-to-day
experiences, but it did not prevent house and field slave children from being
treated as mere property in a way that white children were not.
Many inventories of plantations with children often marked in their notes
slave children’s monetary worth. Historian Daina Ramey Berry notes that many
enslavers identified their strongest males starting in their mid-to-upper teens
and on into their forties. These “full hands” were annotated with a numericalvalue of “1” in many owners’ ledgers. Women and children were marked as
three-quarter (“0.75”), one-half (“0.5”), or one-quarter hands (“0.25”).13 The
youngest children who could work in some capacity were quarter-hands, but
most adolescents were likely considered half-hands. Enslaved children were
not usually expected to work until the age of twelve. Masters often expectedenslaved girls to mate by age sixteen.14 One formerly enslaved Mississippi man,
named Jim Allen, even recalled boyhood memories of toiling in the rich soilsof his owner’s plantation adding that it “took two chillerns to make one hand.”15
It is difficult to imagine ledgers that defined Southern white children solely by
numerical notations.

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Enslaved Black children learned early about notions of work. Historian
Wilma King notes that some of the earliest work responsibilities for children
not yet mature enough to have a trade or work in the fields could range fromtending farm animals, pulling weeds, and completing miscellaneous householdchores to attending babies, gathering eggs, and churning butter. Slave children
were forced to make a “quantum leap from childhood into the world of work.”16
Former Texas slave Ellen Payne remembered being tasked with watching thecows, chickens, and turkeys on her plantation.17 Jack Payne grew up in San
Augustine County, Texas, as a slave. When he was a small child too young towork in the fields, Payne’s mistress had him feeding chickens, making scarecrows
to stave off hawks, and gathering wood for the fire pit.18 Cora Taylor, who grewup as a child slave in Georgia, recalled thinning the cotton from the fields and“mind[ing] the flies” at her owner’s dinner table.”19 Mississippi ex-slave, Foster
Weathersby fondly remembered churning endless gallons of milk.20 Slaveholders were clear from the beginning when it came to their interactions with childslaves: the owners wanted the children to know that they existed in these spaces
to fulfill the express will of the masters and to participate in the continual upkeepof the plantation.
The ability of enslaved children to utilize play as a mechanism of contestation against the institution of slavery and the authority of their masters salvaged
at least part of their childhoods. Former Texas slave Henry Owens confirmed
this, adding, “When I was a kid, I had to help wid almost everything.” One day
Owens’s master rounded up a group of children on a trip into the field. The master told the group to “chop up everything dat was green.” Henry took this command to heart: “I told de other kids to go ahead and chop . . . and dey [started]in to choppin’ up everything dat was green, including de young cawn [corn]!”
The infuriated master screamed at the zealous chopping troop, demanding toknow what they thought they were doing. Owens responded, “’Well, [you] told
us to chop up everything dat was green.’”21
Former Texas slave Rosa Pollard fondly recalled sneaking moments of playwith other slave girls on the plantation. They played Wolf over the River andhide-and-seek. Beyond these games, Rosa and the other girls relied on the powerof magic to keep them safe from the volatile temperaments of their owners. They“hung mistletoe over the door and if Maser or Mistress walked under it, thatmeant they would be good. . . . If we could get a rabbits foot us girls would wear
it around our necks. As long as we did this, Maser would not be mean to us.”22
Enslaved children could use moments of play to undermine slavery and

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thwart the plans of their owners. Little Sue Snow used music to spar with thewhite children with whom she lived, imploding into an epic battle of the bands
that became engrained in the proud troublemaker’s memory:
De white children was a singin’ a song:‘Ol’ Jeff Davis, long an’ slim,
Whupped ol’ Abe wid a hick’ry limb.
Jeff Davis is a wise man an Lincoln is a fool,Ol’ Jeff Davis rides a gray an Lincoln rides a mule.’
I was mad anyhow, an’ I hopped up an’ sung:
Ol’ Gen’l Pope, he had a short gun,Fill it full of bum,
Kill ‘em as dey come.
Call a Union band,
Make de rebels understandTo leave our land,
Submit to Abraham23

Sue bellowed these lyrics with her mistress standing right behind her. Shesoon had such gutsy song knocked out of her when the irate mistress whacked
the insubordinate slave with a nearby broom.
These methods of play had the power to inspire and equip the enslaved,
bestowing some with the necessary tools to be rid of slavery for good. The
recorded actions of three ex-slaves—Richard Harris, Henry Bibb, and Bethany
Veney—illustrate the diversity of enslaved child’s play and its dual ability toappease white onlookers while concealing the enslaved from some of slavery’shorrors. Furthermore, these three historical witnesses exist as lucid examples
of enslaved youths striving for selfhood through mundane acts of play. Harris,Bibb, and Veney each used everyday actions to make the subtle case for selfpossession even while being the legal property of someone else.
In 1916 John George Clinkscales was not satisfied with how the twentiethcentury viewed slavery, so he wrote a book more accurately portraying the daysof slavery and the positives associated with them. On the Old Plantation: Reminiscences of His Childhood was, he said, “written primarily for the benefit of myown children and grandchildren.” As far as this proud white Southerner wasconcerned, “Too many of our young people know of the institution of slavery
only what they’ve learned from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.24 Clinkscales had launcheda virtual public relations campaign on behalf of former slave owners and pro-The Play Practices of Enslaved Children

slavery sympathizers. His objective was to capture the light-hearted moments ofslavery and prove to the world (and his children and grandchildren) the necessity
and rightness of the institution. Richard Harris, a former slave, and boyhood
playmate of Clinkscales played a prominent role in On the Old Plantation.
We come to know Richard Harris only through the eyes of John Clinkscales. Without question, this is a problem, but it also helps us understand thecomplex relationship between enslaved child’s play and the contestation at workin Harris’s quest for selfhood. Thomas Henricks articulates that selfhood has abifurcated purpose. First, it functions as a “way for individuals to understandthemselves.” But it also exists as a result of the “pattern of [one’s] connections
to the world.” Moreover, one can often learn more about oneself by how others
describe them.25 Selfhood oscillates on a pendulum that adjusts the self frombeing an “active negotiator” to a “stable object.”In the case of Richard Harris, readers come to know him only through theeyes of a man who was invested in an institution intent on robbing Harris of his
selfhood. This is an unfortunate reality, but those who work in archives pertaining to slavery in any context know this reality all too well. Clinkscales’s aim, to be
sure, is to soften the brutality of Harris’s enslavement and make the former slave
appear content with his lot as an enslaved person. Observing the interactions
between Clinkscales and Harris offers a realistic, complicated example of how
enslaved people strove for selfhood even while being someone else’s property.
Although the author’s original intent may have been to romanticize owningBlack people, his account of Harris’s interactions with those who owned him
can serve a greater purpose than justifying slavery. Finding slivers of Black joy
in sites and spaces of Black subjugation and bondage never negates the realityof Black oppression. The owners of enslaved Blacks were intimately connectedto their property, and their views and ideas about the Black people they owned
and lived among provide modern readers with valuable information about boththemselves and Black people. It is therefore critical for us to understand selfhood as a “process of active involvement” that includes—both positively andnegatively—“others.”26 Clinkscales provides us with an outsider perspective ofenslaved child’s play that helps us gain a fuller understanding of Richard Harris’s
actions as an enslaved child player seeking self-possession.
Clinkscales drew on a wealth of fond memories to reflect on Harris’s placein the South Carolina plantation home of his childhood. As a boy, Clinkscales
remembered being with his father when they both first laid eyes on Richard
Harris. A slave trader had stopped in town with an excellent-looking group of

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slaves. When Clinkscales’s father saw Harris, he was intrigued. The planter asked
Harris his name, and he said, “‘Richard Harris, suh, dey calls me Dick. . . . He[the slave dealer] say Richard too long name fur a nigger.’”27
Hearing the young boy talk, the planter’s son was fascinated by Harris’s response. Clinkscales watched from a distance as his father and the boy
conversed. When the planter asked twelve-year-old Harris about his previous
owner’s name in Virginia, the young boy’s immediate response was “‘Who dat,
suh?’”28 Clinkscales’s father continued to pry. He followed up his previous question by asking about the boy’s biological father. Harris retorted, “Me ain’ had no
daddy, suh; mammy say me ain’ gut no daddy—she say she des find me.”
The Clinkscales made Harris a house servant with hopes of grooming him
to be a body servant to the mistress. As Harris grew, his quick wit and intelligence blossomed. Even Clinkscales had to make special note of the “little negro[being] so bright and quick and ‘smart.’”29 Three years into Harris’s servitude,
one of the wealthiest men in the community passed away, and buyers came fromnear and far to participate in picking apart the deceased man’s prized inventoryof goods—several acres of land, various livestock, and the golden prize of 350
slaves. The Clinkscales hosted five of these prospective buyers for a week-longstay. By the end of their stay, the five men were so enamored by Harris’s superior
intelligence and reputation among the slaves that one offered three thousand
dollars to take the teenager back home with him to Georgia. The plantation
mistress remained firm, not allowing Richard to be sold.
After eluding the threat of being displaced and sent into the lower South,
Harris and some of his enslaved contemporaries enjoyed a fleeting celebratory
moment, a moment opportune for play. According to Clinkscales, once the men
left, Harris intentionally slipped into the backyard and began jumping for joy
in front of the other slave children. The curious white child must have followed
Richard to the backyard while his father saw the eager businessmen off. Young
Clinkscales was amazed at what he saw. Harris “danced a jig, cut the pigeon
wing, and walked on his hands, all to the delight of a group of pickaninnies, wholooked upon him as a kind of wonder.” As Clinkscales put it, “every negro either
admired him or looked upon him with a kind of suspicious awe.”30
Here, Harris engaged in a game of physical skill that had no other competitor. Instead, it was a play performance done for the children. Harris’s victorious
dance solo entranced his adoring audience. The rewards for Harris in this gamewere the wonder-struck faces of the enslaved children that solidified his mythic
hero status among his fellow slaves. Richard Harris was obviously familiar with

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life on the road as a slave, since he had been already forced to travel hundredsof miles from Virginia to South Carolina. The prodding and violating inspections, the meager rations, the abuse, and the constant threat of being sold wereeveryday experiences for the boy as a traveling piece of property, and it is hard
to imagine someone who would not be ecstatic in Harris’s situation.
Not long after this incident, Harris contracted typhoid fever and lost complete mobility in his legs and feet. The bright teenager with a sharp intellect andfluid movements was now immobilized. Still, Harris’s “unfailing good humor andready wit won for him many kindnesses from his fellow slaves. The men carried
him from place to place on their backs.”31 As Harris continued life disabled andenslaved, his masters found work for him. He was given charge over the enslaved
children on Clinkscales’s plantation (about fifty of them). This group consistedof children ranging from a few weeks old to about age fourteen.
Harris made a game out of learning how to read, which as we know was
illegal for the enslaved. Harris took the initiative and found creative ways to learn
the sounds of various letters he saw. Harris noticed these letters in all sorts ofplaces. He noticed them on the body of a wagon parked on the plantation. He
also saw obscure letters on discarded pieces of paper that flew across the plantation. He even observed them in the leatherbound books his owner’s children
read. Soon, Richard Harris yielded to the curiosity these symbols invoked in him.
The enslaved teen sharpened a stick and began writing out the letters he saw.
At first, it was a challenge to draw the letters correctly, but the boy “kept it
up day after day until he succeeded in making on the ground a creditable copyof the names [on the wagon].”32 Many members of the Clinkscales family played
a role, sharing their school knowledge of words with Harris. One day, he noticed
one of the master’s daughters walking past his dirt letter drawings. The braveslave beckoned, “’Miss Sallie, please ma’m, will you tell me whut them marks ison the wagon body?”’ Sallie was astonished, but she briefly showed the slave how
to pronounce every letter.33 He also asked another daughter, Jennie Clinkscales,
to explain the meaning of letters and words, and she relented. The youngest sister,Ida, even gave the curious young Harris a tattered, faded copy of her Blue Back
Speller of the McGuffie reader series. Once the plantation mistress found out theteen could read, she offered him a New Testament Bible and a Methodist hymnal.
As Richard Harris mastered reading and writing, this only increased his popularity and reverence among the other slaves. Clinkscales remembered Harris soon
spending “the long winter evenings reading to the other slaves. Sometimes a scoreor more of them would assemble in his cabin to hear him.”34 Harris boldly violated

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state and local laws that prevented slaves from reading and writing.
Henry Bibb’s account of living as an enslaved youth paints a less rosy imageof slavery than does Clinkscales’s. Henry Bibb was born in May 1815 in Shelby
County, Kentucky. His mother Milldred Jackson had seven boys, all of them wereborn into slavery. Many of Bibb’s earliest childhood memories were haunted by
the specters of violence and separation. Bibb recalled, the “first time I was separated from mother, I was young and small. I knew nothing of my condition thenas a slave.”35 But he knew firsthand the effects of scant food and clothing duringbone-chilling winter months. By the time he became a teenager, Bibb was often
hired out to other plantations by his owner, a man named White.
All the proceeds White made from Bibb went toward his daughter Harriet’s education fund. Like many child slaves, one of Bibb’s earliest jobs on theplantation was to serve as a play object to his master’s daughter. Bibb may havefirst developed a fondness for hiding in his early play with Harriet. Bibb’s uniqueability to hide became useful as a game of strategy, with the reward being Bibb’s
escape from the presence of a violent woman. Bibb did not state the origins of
his stellar hiding skills, but he did acknowledge them as a gift: “I learned the artof running away to perfection. I made a regular business of it, and never gave
it up.”36
Bibb’s first attempt to run away came after harsh treatment by a neighboring
plantation mistress, a woman named Vires, to whom his master had hired him
out. The mistress flogged Bibb every day he showed up for work. Her insults,“flogging me, boxing, pulling my ears, and scolding” were so overwhelmingthat Bibb soon dreaded making the journey. Bibb finally sought relief by fleeing
the woman’s terrorizing clutches: “I was often gone several days before I wascaught. They would abuse me for going off, but it did no good. The next timethey flogged me, I was off again; but after a while they got sick of their bargain,
and returned me back [to the Whites].”
Vires’s insatiable bloodlust for Bibb put him on the run. As a hired slave,
Bibb found refuge in the woods, but he also learned the importance of staying
mentally alert there. When he passed by other white members of the community
and they questioned why he was alone in the woods, he told them he was out
searching for the family horse or rounding up stray cows. In the woods, Bibb
found the art of deception and a creative imagination essential to his survival.
The slave’s running and hiding soon paid off. He was sent back to his owner,
where he did not have to face daily floggings. By the time Bibb returned to theWhite household, his widowed master had married a new wife. Her attitude andThe Play Practices of Enslaved Children

actions toward Bibb resembled those of the Vires’s plantation mistress he hadjust fled. No surprise then that “she kept me almost half of my time [hiding]in the woods, running from under the bloody lash.” When he was not ducking
beat downs, Bibb—a house servant—was tasked with cleaning furniture, waxing
floors, and even fanning his owners to shoo away flies.37
Bibb eventually used the specialized training garnered in his childhood toconceal himself and become a free man in Canada. He relied on his keen ability
to hide and received the ultimate reward—freedom.
Bethany Veney found refuge and safety not in the woods as did Bibb, but
through her faith. She was born in 1812 on the Fletcher plantation in Virginia.
She published her narrative in 1889 at seventy-seven years old. Veney grew
up on a plantation where her owners made the fear of God a literal weapon tokeep their slaves in line. As a small child, Veney remembered the frightening
apocalyptic Bible stories told by her pious mistress, who warned the little slavethat the entire world as she knew it would one day be burned into oblivion.
The “moon would be turned into blood, the stars would fall out of the sky, andeverything would melt away with a great heat and . . . every little child that had
told a lie would be cast into a lake of fire and brimstone.”38 A traumatized Veney
soon asked her mother if the woman’s words were true. To the little girl’s horror,
her mother confirmed the mistress’s words. But gave a more optimistic end byadding that good fortune would come to those who told the truth and did what
was right. This encounter whetted the young girl’s appetite for religion.
Veney also had vivid memories of performing at the behest of her master.
As a house slave, she was already at the beck and call of the Fletcher family.
Whenever the family hosted guests, Veney was often coerced into becoming the evening entertainment. After supper, Fletcher “would call me into his
room . . . giving me to understand what he wanted of me. I would, with all manner of grotesque grimaces, gestures, and positions, dance and sing.” A contorted
and distorted Veney delighted the white onlookers as she engaged in her complex
performance.39 The master had asked, and Veney had delivered. By the time
she was nine years old, her master had died, and his death was followed by thetypical inventory of property that often threatened to disrupt social ties among
the enslaved. The threat proved all too real for Veney, who was soon separated
from her three siblings. With no one left to turn to, Veney sought religion forsolace and fulfillment.
The persistent threat of slavery and its broken family led Veney to seek refuge in the imaginary. When the Fletcher estate was settled, Veney and her sister

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Matilda had become the property of her former master’s eldest daughter Lucy,
who—bothered by the nature of the South’s peculiar institution—attempted
to turn Bethany over to a white man visiting from Ohio. Soon after Fletcher’s
death, Lucy moved in with her sister Nasenath and brother-in-law David Kibbler.
Veney remembered Kibbler as being a violent man who frequently abused her.
When Kibbler discovered Lucy’s plot, he intervened, to Bethany’s dismay. With
freedom so close, but still so far away, Veney, often, over the years, wondered
about the prospects of living life as a free Black girl. “I have sometimes tried to
picture what my life might have been could I have been set free at that age; andI have imagined myself with a young girl’s ambition, working hard and carefullysaving my earnings.” Moreover, she often comforted herself by imagining that
she could use such hard-earned money to buy a home big enough to plant agarden and bring “my sisters and brothers to share with me these blessings of
freedom.”40 Veney used the imaginary realm to think about her life and family
members in contexts larger than enslavement. In her make-believe world, she
could make money and save. She could plant food and have enough to share withher siblings. Her family could be a whole unit. These imaginations consoled thesulking slave, but even they fell short. One night Veney’s sympathetic mistressdecided to send her off with her sister-in-law to a revival meeting in hopes oflifting her spirits. This meeting would transform Veney’s life forever.
Bethany Veney used her newfound faith as a game that could challenge
her master’s authority. It was a game of strategy. Its reward for Veney was agreater range of mobility. By the time Bethany and her master’s sister had
arrived, the big-tent meeting service was well underway. As they inched closer
to the revival, the preacher’s voice rang through the air, winding through bothwoods and hearts. Although she could not remember the exact message hepreached, she would never forget the hymn the preacher sang after the sermon.
“It was a hymn of many verses (I afterwards got an old woman to teach them tome). . . . There was such tenderness in his voice and such solemnity in his mannerthat I was greatly affected.” After the minister finished his soul-stirring number,he managed to lock eyes with the vulnerable-looking slave girl. He approached
her and asked if she wanted a new religious experience that would result in ahappier afterlife. He then whispered specific instructions into her ear: go home,
get on your knees, and ask God to “give me the witness that I was his. . . . As soon
as I reached home and was alone, I knelt down, and in my feeble and ignorant
way begged to be saved.”41
Following her conversion, Veney became zealous for her newfound faith.

The Play Practices of Enslaved Children

The teen girl generated enough fuss on the plantation to be sent to “Mr. Levers,
two miles away.” Her master sent the girl “there to stay until I should get over my‘religious fever’ as he called it.” This was a sickness that he did not want to spread.
Veney’s religious conversion marked a dramatic alteration in her behavior thatleft her owner feeling threatened. Whatever Veney experienced in those sketchy
revival services may have done her more harm than good. The meetinghousethe enslaved girl attended was a great distance from her plantation, far enoughfor her master to allow her to go services and come back the next morning. As
Veney’s faith continued to interfere with her status as a slave, her master grew
irritated. One day, “in the middle of the meeting, Master Kibbler came up tome, and taking me by the arm carried me out, scolding and fuming, declaringthat [the minister] was a liar.”42
Veney’s meeting days were in danger of being at an end. One night—distraught and overwhelmed by the prospect of never again being able to attend
the meetings—she was praying, and the idea came to her to remain on her knees
and grovel at her master’s feet. “At last, I . . . was able to enter the room, where I
saw him sitting.” She made her request: “O Master, may I go to meeting?”43 The
master saw the slave girl pleading on her knees and relented. Veney had put on
the performance of a lifetime and was never worried about attending religious
meetings again.
The irony in Veney’s account stems from the reality that the very religion
Mistress Fletcher thought would tame and acclimate young Bethany to her slavery would be the same faith that weakened her hold on the slave. Bethany Veney
would make her eventual exit from slavery when she was sold to a man from
Rhode Island. She spent the remainder of her life in Worcester, Massachusetts,
where she became an active member of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal
Church. Veney died at the ripe age of 103 in 1915.

Race and Play Practices Revisted
The play practices of enslaved children challenge conventional understandingsof recreation and extend the invitation to think about slavery, race, and play in a
new way. I have highlighted a variety of play practices from the lived experiencesof three formerly enslaved Black people. These practices ranged from feigning
ignorance, dancing on the spot, hiding, fighting, singing, and sabotaging crops tofinding religion. Play practices enabled enslaved Black youths to challenge their

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status as chattel by pushing the boundaries of their status as slaves. Play practices
enabled enslaved children to realize the breadth and depth of their selfhood.
Conventional acts of play are often associated with pleasure or amusement, butthey do not consider enslaved children’s obligations to their masters or the aimsof the enslaved children. Master-slave obligations were not seasonal, nor liketides. These children were always owned by human beings. Play for enslavedBlack children held an inherent politicization for enslaved youth because of thisconstant surveillance and ownership. Also, enslaved children still attempted tosalvage their childhoods. They still sought ways to reap rewards whether thesewere praise, tangible products, or inward feelings of comfort.
The lived reality of enslaved children amounted to this: every piece of their
physical body belonged to their owners. The feet they jived and hid with, thethroats that released in melodic song, the brains they used to create the objectsof their artistic imaginations were all legally owned by someone else, and theslaves did not have to travel far to learn this hard truth. Auctions, slave codes,
owners, and nonslaveholding whites constantly reminded them. The enjoyment
and leisure of slaves so often touted by early twentieth-century apologists forslavery comprised a historical publicity stunt aimed at restoring the reputationof white men and women who participated in one of America’s most brutal
institutions. Men like John Clinkscales perfectly embodied this movement. Theysought only to show the love and harmony fixed between the needy, backward
Black people, and the noble, protective white masters who made them property,
all done to say that slavery was not all that bad.
Slavery was not a game, but in a sense, surviving the institution—or evenevading it—required game-like skills. Saidiya Hartman in Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America suggests that
violence was central to the experiences of all slaves—young and old. For enslaved
youth, the concept of playing cannot be disentangled from the specter of violence. Hartman argues that enslaved peoples’ “enjoyment was predicated on thewanton uses of property, it was attributed to the slave in order to deny, displace,and minimize the violence of ” slavery.44
Each of the enslaved young people I have highlighted employed play practices to make living through slavery more tolerable. Their efforts required tact,creativity, and careful calculation. Too much play could get an enslaved Blackchild sold or killed. Those who denied Black people their equality with whites
would later use Black play practices against the enslaved and the newly freed.
The efforts of writers and scholars on slavery at the beginning of the twentiethThe Play Practices of Enslaved Children

century attest to this reality.45 Supporters of slavery used the play of slaves tobestow a false sense of acceptance by the enslaved about their status as toys
(objects) and to conceal the wretchedness of the institution. Making enslaved
children appear oblivious to pain and welcoming to white discipline made theviolence of slavery an act of benevolence from the perspective of the enslavers.
Acts of play by enslaved children were not always indicators of contentment. It is certainly true that enslaved children and adults who lived outside of
the big house formed meaningful relationships with each other and carved out
spaces of happiness when they were not supposed to be working. Enslaved young
people had to tow a fine line as they engaged in various forms of recreation. Playin front of white spectators could be volatile. Any form of play that undermined
the plantation system or made a public challenge to the master’s authority could
be met with violence or even death. However, Hartman encourages readers andstudents of American slavery to challenge voyeuristic mentalities that makeslavery inhumane solely because of its violent moments. Slavery would havestill been an evil even if no violence occurred for the simple reason that underslavery human beings were systematically prevented from being and possessing
themselves.
While dwelling on the institution’s brutality may lead to voyeurism, hanging on to the songs, dance moves, and quirky comments of the enslaved disrupt
the full “recognition of Black humanity [which] itself becomes an exercise ofviolence.”46 Slave play matters for this reason. John Clinkscales’s racist interpretation of Richard Harris’s existence matters and should be included here
for this very reason. Understanding the life experiences of enslaved young
people beyond the realm of violence helps us avoid becoming “voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance.”47 Associating
the institution of slavery with jovial, young slaves must not make the institution any less evil. Allowing violence alone to define slavery in itself makes us
indifferent to the problems of Black humans being owned. The ultimate goalis this: not to become desensitized to the ravaging of Black bodies in the past,present, or future.
Even if the enslaved were fed, played games, and could count on stablehousing in bondage, they were still rendered as property and were not people
by law. Furthermore, accounts of the “slaves dancing in the quarters” and the“outrageous darky antics of the minstrel stage” should be viewed with just as
much disdain as accounts of slaves being brutalized by the lash. Seeing enslaved
children used “like animals and treated as if they existed only for the master’s

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profits” should incite rage.48 For Hartman, one troublesome element of slave
narratives is that many of their white readers can get a front-row seat at someof the more gruesome incidents in the personal lives of the enslaved. The plightof the enslaved becomes a “freak show,” one in which the purchase of its narrative becomes the price of admission. White, abolitionist publishers hoped that
their fellow (white) readers would be able to imagine themselves in the shoesof the slaves. The medium of pain and loss—a “universal” experience—becamea catalyst for “slipping into the captive’s body.”49
That the empathy of many readers was activated only by placing themselvesin the position of the enslaved, is problematic and has lingering consequences
today. For the suffering of the enslaved to become worthy of activism, it had
to first take on a new identity—it had to put on white face. Hartman argues
that this ostensible act of empathy works to inculcate a sense of Black peoples’
opacity. Taking the suffering lives of enslaved Blacks and imposing oneself intheir stead to make the experiences of the enslaved legible obscures the full
humanity of the enslaved. It renders them and their experiences translucent.
Displacing the enslaved to see oneself legitimizes the experiences of the enslaved
but misappropriates the Black body as a “vehicle of the other’s power, pleasure,and profit” while also making them poor stewards of their pain. The concept of
the enslaved Black body being opaque feeds into the concept of the Black bodyas a fungible object. Black fungibility makes Blackness malleable and prone
to shape-shifting. In this context, the lived witnesses of the enslaved become“vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.”50
The words, accounts, and play practices of enslaved children will never standalone. They are sampled and mastered in a studio of white exploration. Here theraw notes of the enslaved take on a different sound. The sonic transformation isunpredictable, because it sways with the feelings, emotions, and agendas of theones behind the production.
Nevertheless, enslaved young people worked within this apparatus, employing their play practices to envision alternate realities, challenge social labels, andcultivate social bonds. Play practices of the enslaved assisted in socializing slave
relations among themselves and with their owners. Young Richard Harris firstmet his new owner and was forced into a one-on-one dialogue before other white
and Black spectators just before his bill of sale was signed. His conversation withthe man was a performance, a form of play.
As a slave for sale, Harris had likely engaged in conversations with otherinquiring white buyers. He knew how to go through the motions of entertaining

The Play Practices of Enslaved Children

someone who would own him for the rest of his life. Harris’s performance in theconversation was memorable enough to make the slaveholder’s son remember
it decades after it occurred.
From the beginning of the conversation, Harris subtly showed his rebel
streak. When the potential owner asked the boy his name, he gave his legal firstand last name even though the slave trader had given him a shorter nickname(Dick). The elder Clinkscales asked the boy for the name of his previous master,and Harris responded by appearing puzzled asking whom he meant. As a young,enslaved boy at the age of twelve, Harris would have been acquainted with andremembered his owner’s name. To feign a lack of knowledge of the man’s namesuggests that at least in the boy’s mind, his former owner did not exist.
At one point, it seemed as though Harris might face the possibility of being
sold further South. After the threat waned, Harris ran to the back of the big houseand put on a private show for his fellow slaves. He danced, twisted, and flippedwith joy and relief. Harris, who had already experienced being sold once, did notwant to go through that process again. As the white spectator saw it, Harris wasdoing all sorts of dance moves either to impress the onlooking enslaved children
or because he was satisfied with being the Clinkscales’s property.
The reality is that Harris may have been overjoyed, but it had less to dowith remaining on the Clinkscales’s plantation and more to do with avoiding
the horrors of the domestic slave trade. Scores of slaves were chained by the
ankles and held together by adjoining metal collars on their necks. Slaves sent
further South were forced to travel on foot for hundreds of miles. They had tobrave the unpredictability of nature with scant food, water, or clothing. They
had to undergo the experience of being examined, poked, and jabbed in city
after city—all while witnessing the separation and horrors associated with slave
auctions across the Eastern seaboard. It is fitting to see the entire affair as a tourof terror for enslaved Blacks. The truth about Harris’s dancing is therefore madeplain. He did not dance as a satisfied South Carolina slave. He danced because
he escaped a more traumatic experience than the one he was currently living
through. The audience of enslaved children became a part of the performance as
they watched and celebrated with him. They rejoiced with Harris as he rejoiced.
All of this occurred with the younger Clinkscales watching and creating his
interpretation of the event from a distance.
When Henry Bibb continuously resorted to hiding in hopes of curbing his
mistress’s abusive behavior, the two became intertwined in a modified game ofcat and mouse. Bibb would come to work and take a beating every day, but when

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it became unbearable, he would hide for weeks at a time. He would eventually befound and punished, and then he would be hired back out to the same woman.
The cycle went on and on until the lady finally grew tired of Bibb’s game and sent
him back to his owner. This give-and-take between the white woman and thefleeing slave represents Bibb’s constant quest for self-possession. The owners ofenslaved people knew they could never fully own or control their human property, so they yielded at times to mild rebellion to maintain control of the system.
When thinking within the context of enslavement, games must take on a
new identity. As privileged free people, it can be challenging to observe a gameand assume this game to be a space for joy or pleasure. The enslavement ofyoung Black children complicated the utility and purpose of games. Some games
were played for the sake of survival or protection. Bibb’s repetitive hiding was a
direct challenge to the violence and authority vested in his owners and a direct
attempt at self-possession. State and local laws gave slaveholders total authority
over the bodies of their slaves. Most violence meted out against the enslaved
was acceptable by law. Enslaved people were not considered full-fleshed humanbeings under the law—they were more like ghosts. Their presence could be felt
(through slave codes), but they were not seen, and they had no protections
under the law. The paradox in Henry Bibb’s playing is that each time Bibb took
cover in the woods to conceal his afflicted body, he simultaneously beckoned
for more humane (less violent) treatment while also putting himself at a greaterrisk of a violent, white response. Bibb envisioned running away as an “art.” It wasa performance that he perfected. Bibb began the play practice of running andhiding at an early age. This skill proved essential in his eventual escape North.
Bethany Veney found religion helpful in navigating her life as a young Black
enslaved girl. She attended a meeting one night and became a converted soul.
Veney’s retention and performance of her faith can be classified as a game. It wasa game of strategy with the reward of spending less time on the plantation under
the watchful eye of her master, who loved forcing her to sing and dance at his
good pleasure. Bethany’s already intersectional life as a Black enslaved woman
became even more complicated by her religious zeal. The young girl became anantebellum Jesus freak. As her interest in learning more about faith overcame her
ability to complete her slave duties, the master had to stop Veney’s performance.
He even called it a sickness and forced her to leave the plantation until she wasrid of the ailment. The girl’s mistress had hopes of using religion to keep Veney
under her control, but Veney used religion to undermine it.
The play practices of enslaved children illuminate the realities of slavery

The Play Practices of Enslaved Children

and enrich myriad fields of study. This article stands as proof of that because
it encompasses scholarship from a vast array of disciplines. Although conventional understandings of play practices often have more positive connotations,enslaved young people had a different relationship with play because they were
not considered fully people. Play cannot be distinguished from power. Enslaved
peoples’ play practices existed against a backdrop of not possessing themselves.
Many of the forms of play I have mentioned were grounded in Black quests
for self-possession. Historians and critics have long debated just how muchagency enslaved people owned. Analyzing the play practices of enslaved children suggests that there was a daily fight for agency between the enslaved andtheir owners. Bibb’s cat-and-mouse game of hiding from his violent owners
is emblematic of Black youths’ elusive quest for ownership over themselves.
The experiences highlighted here suggest that play practices could be both selfinduced and commanded by white owners or even a mixture of both.
Whatever the case, all forms of enslaved child’s play required both the owners and the enslaved to be in proximity to each other. Saidiya Hartman argues
that the historical archives holding the documents scholars and historians use in
the field is always and already problematized. Moreover, the archives is “a death
sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property.”51 It
becomes the final resting place for those who died with the power. The archives
levy a sometimes stealthy white gaze that already skews the words, actions, anddecisions of the enslaved. Hartman does not suggest that the archive be abandoned, but she does articulate the need for scholars to reckon with the loss andincompleteness found there. The rawest and most authentic performances ofenslaved youths may not have been recorded for the books because they were notcommitted for spectators or eavesdroppers. They held meaning and significanceunknown to the dominating group. Notwithstanding this lack, what remains
in the archives proves invaluable and necessary for evolving studies about thesocial development of enslaved children amid the penetrating white gaze andits modern parallels.

Conclusion
November 22, 2014, was a cool, overcast day in the city of Cleveland, Ohio, but
the city soon stirred to its boiling point. On this day a boy named Tamir Rice waslabeled armed and dangerous and gunned down by the city police. Rice was just

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twelve years old (the same age as Richard Harris when he met his owner). Rice
had a replica of a Colt pistol for which he had traded for a cellphone earlier inthe day. In school, Rice was known for playing pranks on his peers. After school,
the boy shuffled with excitement to the park near his home. While at the park, hebrandished and waved the toy gun in the faces of passersby. A civilian soon called
911 to alert authorities that someone was pointing a pistol and scaring people.
He noted that the gun was “probably fake” and that the assailant was “probably
a juvenile.” By the time the rookie police officer Tim Loehmann arrived all the“probablies” had vanished.
The little boy playing with a toy gun at the park had become a legitimate
threat in the eyes of the officers who shot him. One officer’s excited, anxious voice
can be heard over the dispatch system: “Shots fired, male down . . . Black male,maybe twenty, black revolver, black handgun by him.”52 The officer’s gaze envisioned a Rice stripped of any childlike characteristics. He recasted the twelveyear-old boy into a gun-toting, adult menace. Although America has long done
away with the institution of chattel slavery, the play practices of Black American
youths today remain liable to be met with public violence or outright execution.

Notes
1. George P. Rawick, ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Florida
Narratives (1972), 17:52–53.
2. Howard Chudacoff, Children at Play: An American History (2007), xii.
3. Thomas S. Henricks, “Play as Self-Realization: Toward a General Theory of Play,”
American Journal of Play 6 (2014): 190.
4. Ibid., 197.
5. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982), 5.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. John M. Roberts, Malcolm J. Arth, and Robert R. Bush, “Games in Culture,” American Anthropologist 61 (1959): 597. These anthropologists collected ethnographic dataon a host of African tribes. They confined the realm of play to the recreational. While
I do argue for a more expansive understanding of play than Roberts, Arth, and Bush’s
propose, the anthropologists’ three classifications of games help establish my argument
for the pervasiveness of play (and games) in every aspect of enslaved children’s lives.
8. For scholarship on the resistance of American slaves see Sharla Fett, Working
Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (2002); Stephanie M.
H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation
South (2004); Walter C. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, andThe Play Practices of Enslaved Children

Identity Formation in Early America (2006); Gerald Horne, The Counter-Revolution of
1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America (2014); and Erica
Armstrong Dunbar, She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (2019).
9. Rawick, ed., Florida Narratives, 156.
10. Chudacoff, Children at Play, 60.
11. Ibid., 138–139.
12. George P. Rawick, ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement Series 1, Mississippi Narratives (1977) 10:1934–35.
13. Daina Ramey Berry, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved,
from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation (2017), 68–69.
14. Many of the accounts of enslaved people in the WPA narratives mention theage of twelve being the year that official work began. It was also common to see many
enslaved teenaged girls would get married off or forced into a breeding situation between
sixteen and twenty. The bulk of the examples used throughout this essay relies on theexperiences of children sixteen and under.
15. Chudacoff, Children at Play, 44. See George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave:
A Composite Autobiography, Supplement Series 1, Mississippi Narratives, (1978), 6:55.
16. Wilma King, Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America (1995),
21–29. King suggests that most enslaved children were doing routine forms of work by
the age of nine or ten.
17. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement Series 2, Texas Narratives (1979), 8:3040.
18. Ibid., 3044.
19. Rawick, ed., Florida Narratives, 41.
20. Rawick, ed., Mississippi Narratives, 10:2229.
21. Ibid., 3007. Emphasis mine.
22. Rawick, ed., Texas Narratives, 8:3122.
23. Rawick, ed., Mississippi Narratives, 10:2007–8.
24. J. G. Clinkscales, On the Old Plantation: Reminiscences of His Childhood (1916), 5.
25. Henricks, “Play as Self-Realization,” 198, 200.
26. Ibid.
27. Clinkscales, On the Old Plantation, 37. Clinkscales describes the purchasing of
the human chattel Harris as a passive, nonchalant act: “The price was named, a check
was written, and Dick stepped out of line.”
28. Ibid., 38.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 41.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 43.
33. Ibid., 44.
34. Ibid., 46. Harris died at the age of fifty, having survived slavery by over two
decades. Clinkscales reflected on his life with an affirming tone despite the man’s Blackness: “He had a brown skin, but a golden heart…” [p.51] This former owner’s reflection

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was a part of the larger propaganda machine in the South that became popular after
Reconstruction. It sought to portray Southern slavery as an era of harmony, love, andstability between Blacks and whites. Harris was looked upon with such good graces
because he made himself at heart unassuming and warm in Clinkscales’s eyes. Harris’s
heart was “golden” if he appeared docile, jolly, and meek in the white gaze.
35. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American
Slave, Written by Himself (1849), 13.
36. Ibid., 15. Here it is significant to note an important discrepancy. The original
narrative of Henry Bibb, which was published in 1849, states that Bibb made his firstsignificant escape to the woods in 1825. This would make Bibb around ten years old if
this dating is accurate. However, a reprint of Bibb’s narrative in an edited compilation ofslave narratives by Gilbert Osofsky, Puttin’ on Ole Massa: The Slave Narratives of Henry
Bibb, William Wells Brown, and Solomon Northup (1969) places Bibb’s first escape dateten years later in 1835. If he escaped in 1835, he would have been a twenty-year-oldman. While Bibb’s testimony may vary between the two texts, readers do know that hegrew up playing with his master’s daughter Harriet.
37. Ibid., 16. Here Bibb specified, “she would often seat herself in a large rocking
chair, with two pillows about her, and would make me rock her, and keep off the flies.”
38. Bethany Veney, “The Narrative of Bethany Veney a Slave Woman,” in From Bondage to Belonging: The Worcester Slave Narratives, edited by B. Eugene McCarthy andThomas L. Doughton (2007), 214.
39. Ibid., 215.
40. Ibid., 218.
41. Ibid., 219.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 220.
44. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America (1997), 25.
45. See James Curtis Ballagh, A History of Slavery in Virginia (1902); Ulrich Bonnell
Phillips, American Negro Slavery: Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro
Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime (1918); and William Sumner Jenkins,
Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South (1935).
46. Ibid., 35.
47. Ibid., 3.
48. Ibid., 4.
49. Ibid., 18. See Get Out, a feature film directed by Jordan Peele (2017).
50. Ibid., 50–51.
51. Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12 (2008): 2, 4. That we cometo learn of Richard Harris only through the account of John G. Clinkscales reifies Hartman’s argument.
52. Shaila Dewan and Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “In Tamir Rice Case, Many Errors byCleveland Police, Then a Fatal One,” New York Times, January 22, 2015.