Joining Places

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.<br/><br/><i>Joining Places</i> 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.