Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South
In her first book, Schwartz looks deeply into the everyday ways masters and slave parents negotiated for "control" over slave children, a subject only recently plumbed in Thomas Webber's Deep Like the Rivers and Wilma King's Stolen Childhood. With a sophisticated reading of the WPA slave narratives, she reconstructs the experiences of slaves in Virginia, South Carolina, and Alabama, from birth, becoming "educated" to the world around them, reaching sexual maturity, and learning to work. Masters had ultimate power, in law and practice, and threatened slave families with disruption and sale, but they also sought to win over slave children with affection and favors. Slave parents simultaneously sought to protect their children by teaching them how to "put on ole massa" and to look to the slave community for identity and support. In her very readable book, Schwartz finds the masters' paternalism less generous than slaveholders boasted and more complicated than historians surmise today. An important addition to scholarship for all college libraries.-Randall M. Miller, Saint Joseph's Univ., PhiladelphiaCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.