Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. (Book Reviews).

Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. By Marie Jenkins Schwartz. (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. 272. $35.00, ISBN 0-674-00162-1.)

Enslaved children lived lives that, from birth, were deeply enmeshed in multiple worlds. Black and white alike greeted them, joyous at the arrival of new life, but for very different reasons. As Marie Jenkins Schwartz, an associate professor of history at the University of Rhode Island, details in Born in Bondage, black and white adults in the antebellum plantation South had very different expectations for the lives of these children. And the children themselves would spend their formative years learning to negotiate the treacherous currents of black and white adults' conflicting demands. Schwartz describes a new kind of "twoness" in the history of black consciousness: the duality experienced by enslaved children as they learned that their parents were not the only authorities to be taken into account during the course of a day, much less a life. "Theirs was a world in which the lines of authority were murky. They needed to please owners.... But they also needed to please parents and other slaves upon whom they depended for survival" (p. 9). And by whom, it might be added, they were loved, and who they admired and loved in return. Learning that they were answerable to two distinct, unequal, and often contradictory authorities was a painful process, with violent punishment the consequence for wrong actions since physical discipline was the norm among both blacks and whites.

Using the WPA interviews of ex-slaves, plantation management advice literature, an unpublished questionnaire conducted by Herman C. Nixon in 1912-13, nineteenth-century slave narratives, and a few plantation records, Schwartz details the different lessons that parents and owners hoped enslaved children would learn. Parents instilled in children their values and their "critiques of slavery" (p. 105), taught them the art of flattery, and trained them in the racial etiquette of the Old South, which included deference and work skills but also discretion and sensitivity to the difference between public and private information. Most of all, parents wanted their children to understand that "they--not owners--headed the slave family" (p. 78). Meanwhile owners hoped to do just the opposite: they "emphasized to slave children that they `belonged' to someone other than their parents" (p. 93).

Although Schwartz sometimes shows how slave children played an active role in their own self-formation, the book might have paid more attention to the worlds that they created for themselves. Too often, the book's action centers around owners and parents. But children's lives were rich, and this reader wished to learn more about black children's experience of play in their youngest years, the transition to work, interaction with white children, coming of age and falling in love, separation from loved ones and friends, and the inner lives of individual children and their relationships with each other as they grew up together. Nonetheless, Schwartz has made an important and novel contribution to the hotly debated history of the slave family.

STEPHANIE M. H. CAMP
University of Washington