Title: Roll, Jordan, roll :
Authors: Genovese, Eugene D.,; Chandler, Alfred D.; Frank and Virginia Williams Collection of Lincolniana (Mississippi State University. Libraries)|5MsSM
Date: 1974
Publisher: Pantheon Books,
Physical description: xxii, 823 pages ; 25 cm
Language: English
LC classification: E
Abstract: 'Genovese's long-awaited magnum opus...is also the most profound, learned and detailed analysis of Negro slavery to appear since World War II,' said the New York Times, who also selected it as one of the seven significant books of 1974 - an opinion that was echoed by the Sunday Times in its round-up world publishing for that year. Professor Genovese has drawn on an immense range of evidence - family papers, slave journals, contemporary newspapers, plantation records, as well as on the expertise of authorities in many diverse fields - sociologists, folklorists, theologians and legal historians. But his enormous achievement is to have woven a mass of material into a fascinating and readable book, and to have brought to its interpretation a delicacy, a sympathy and a broad humanism that makes this not a dry history, but a brilliant reconstruction of the lives of real, three-dimensional people. The picture that this book presents is a radical reassessment of an entire society. It destroys many of the accepted myths about the Old South and most of its stereotypes - the genial Mammy, the emasculated black male, the omnipotent master and overseer, the obsequious black preacher. The master-slave relationship was much more complicated than that. Though slavery remains one of history's great crimes, slaves were able to adopt strategies which enabled them to resist both cruelty and degradation. The greatest danger came not so much from the brutality of the masters as from their attempts to make the slaves a party to a system of paternalism that was both more insidious and harder to resist than straightforward tyranny. That the slaves were able to maintain their individual and collective identity, and ultimately to enrich and to shame the culture that enslaved them, they owed to strength of personality, a shrewd manipulation of mutual dependence, and, perhaps above all, to extraordinary religious faith.
Contents: Bk. I. God is not mocked. pt. 1. Of the willing and the obedient. On paternalism ; Farmers, planters, and overseers ; The hegemonic function of the law ; In the name of humanity and the cause of reform ; Our Black family ; A duty and a burden ; Of concubines and horses ; The moment of truth -- pt. 2. And the children bought up. To the manor born ; De good massa ; Our white folks ; Some valiant soldier here -- Bk. II. The rock and the church. pt. 1. Of the God of the living. The Christian tradition ; Slave religion in hemispheric perspective ; Black conversation and white sensibility ; Let the dead bury the dead ; The white preachers ; Origins of the folk religion ; The gospel in the quarters ; The Black preachers ; Religious foundations of the Black nation -- pt. 2. And every man according as his work shall be. Time and work rhythms ; A "lazy" people ; The Black work ethic -- Bk. III. The valley of the shadow. pt. 1. Of the sons of Jacob. Life in the big house ; The men between ; Men of skill ; Free Negroes ; Miscegenation ; The language of class and nation ; A conclusion and a preface -- pt. 2. And the coat of many colors. The naming of cats ; The myth of the absent family ; Romances of the field ; Broomsticks and orange blossoms ; Husbands and fathers ; Wives and mothers ; The children ; The old folks ; Hearth and home ; Gardens ; Kitchens, high and low ; Clothes make the man and the woman ; Reading, writing, and prospects ; De big times -- Bk. IV. Whom God hath hedged in. The slave revolts ; On resistance ; "Roast pig is a wonderful delicacy, especially when stolen" ; Standing up to the man ; Brothers, sisters, and no-'counts ; "All Negroes are fatalists" ; The runaways ; The bright and morning star -- Appendix : The fate of paternalism in modern bourgeois society : the case of Japan.
Subject headings (LCSH): African Americans.; Slavery--United States--Condition of slaves.; Slaves--United States--Social conditions