The Quarters And The Fields

The Quarters and the Fields offers a unique approach to the examination of slavery. Rather than focusing on slave work and family life on cotton plantations, Damian Pargas compares the practice of slavery among the other major agricultural cultures in the nineteenth-century South: tobacco, mixed grain, rice, and sugar cane. He reveals how the demands of different types of masters and crops influenced work patterns and habits, which in turn shaped slaves' family life. By presenting a broader view of the complex forces that shaped enslaved people's family lives, not only from outside but also from within, this book takes an inclusive approach to the slave agency debate. A comparative study that examines the importance of time and place for slave families, The Quarters and the Fields provides a means for understanding them as they truly were: dynamic social units that were formed and existed under different circumstances across time and space.

This volume introduces a new way to study the experiences of runaway slaves by defining different “spaces of freedom” they inhabited. It also provides a groundbreaking continental view of fugitive slave migration, moving beyond the usual regional or national approaches to explore locations in Canada, the U.S. North and South, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Using newspapers, advertisements, and new demographic data, contributors show how events like the Revolutionary War and westward expansion shaped the slave experience. Contributors investigate sites of formal freedom, where slavery was abolished and refugees were legally free, to determine the extent to which fugitive slaves experienced freedom in places like Canada while still being subject to racism. In sites of semiformal freedom, as in the northern United States, fugitives’ claims to freedom were precarious because state abolition laws conflicted with federal fugitive slave laws. Contributors show how local committees strategized to interfere with the work of slave catchers to protect refugees. Sites of informal freedom were created within the slaveholding South, where runaways who felt relocating to distant destinations was too risky formed maroon communities or attempted to blend in with free black populations. These individuals procured false documents or changed their names to avoid detection and pass as free. The essays discuss slaves’ motivations for choosing these destinations, the social networks that supported their plans, what it was like to settle in their new societies, and how slave flight impacted broader debates about slavery. This volume redraws the map of escape and emancipation during this period, emphasizing the importance of place in defining the meaning and extent of freedom. Contributors: Kyle Ainsworth | Mekala Audain | Gordon S. Barker | Sylviane A. Diouf | Roy E. Finkenbine | Graham Russell Gao Hodges | Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie | Viola Franziska Müller | James David Nichols | Damian Alan Pargas | Matthew Pinsker A volume in the series Southern Dissent, edited by Stanley Harrold and Randall M. Miller

Cove Harbor was a hotbed of all that Granny lamented. Even the locals defined their little enclave as a small town heat wave. Cove Harbor was at least as hot as Miss. Lillians description of Jamie. All the fans in Georgia could not cool Cove Harbor off - not the fans, not the housewives, not the whores, not the saints, not the whites, not the Blacks: Cove Harbor was hot! Bowmans Quarters was a laboratory for Granny Cauldron. She stood up and pulled back the hand made curtains. Peeking through the window out over the circular porch that provided a panoramic view of Bowmans Quarters, she felt the pulling and tugging of her emotions as she assessed the plight of her people in Bowmans Quarters against the tales of a people out of Africa, as told by her father. It was clear that Mr. Bowman had no claim on the Whelan family, but he seemed to have his way with some of the females on his place Mr. Bowman darted from the house trying desperately to fasten his pants. Mr. Hoos entered the house just as his wife emerged from the bedroom, clothes awry. In my own house, he muttered in a stupor. Is there nothing sacred for us colored? Passing Hazel Maes bedroom window while paying a visit to her friend Joan one evening, Mamie heard a noise. She took the noises emanating from inside the window for distress signals. As Mamie nervously approached the window and peeked in, there was Hazel Mae, buck naked, writhing as if she was in pain. She was involved in some serious lovemaking with someone whose identity Mamie could not discern at the moment. Peering out into the ocean from the infamous Door of no Return the twins wept as they held each other close.

The brilliant, bestselling, Giller Prize–winning novel Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues took the literary world by storm when it was first published, captivating readers and reviewers with its audacity, power, and sheer brilliance. The novel won or was nominated for every literary prize in Canada—and many international ones, too, including the prestigious Man Booker Prize. It was hailed as one of the best books of the year by Oprah, The Globe and Mail, Amazon, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Vancouver Sun, and it was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, the narrator of Half-Blood Blues, musician Sid Griffiths, leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world and into the heart of his own guilty conscience. The bestselling, award-winning Half-Blood Blues is an entrancing, electric story about jazz, race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves—and demand of others—in the name of art.

Originally published: Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1998.