Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth Century Louisiana.

In Sweet Chariot, Ann Patton Malone analyzes data from 155 Louisiana slave communities during the period 1810 to 1865. Malone's research is exhaustive, making particular use of probate court records, as well as wills, letters, and other primary sources. And she is a careful and thoughtful scholar, mindful of the diversity of slave experience caused by such factors as gender, age, and change in conditions over time. She is also precise in her terminology, making distinctions about the nature of kin relations in family composition.

Malone essentially supports the thesis of revisionists of the '70s and '80s like Herbert Gutman that slaves possessed family ties which were crucial to their survival. But her interpretation differs in several ways. First, she focuses more on household composition, rather than family roles and functions. Second, her data are more comprehensive and probably more reliable. And she is more accurate in her terminology. While Gutman found a majority of slaves living in two-parent households, this was out of a population of slaves already living in families, not the entire community. He, like most revisionists, had ignored the existence of "solitaires," slaves living alone. Most slaves did not live with both parents in a traditional nuclear family, Malone says, but most did live in a "simple family" (defined as married couples with or without children, or a single person with children).

Despite the important contribution this work makes to refining our picture of the slave family, readers may find the book frustrating and difficult in parts. The use of statistics, as well as two models, one showing patterns of slave family composition, another showing change in families over time, may prove daunting to readers unfamiliar or uncomfortable with cliometrics. One hungers to learn more about the meaning of the numbers, to have them translated into the stories of real people, but even the case studies of slave communities are disappointing in this regard.

Part of the problem is in the book's style. While Malone should be commended for the detail she presents, without the necessary tag lines to pull it all together, the reader quickly becomes overwhelmed. The cast of characters, black and white, the numbers of people assigned to various categories of family structures, and the contextual material of events in the U.S. becomes blurred without some assistance from the author in sorting it all out.

The book's organization also contributes to the confusion. Reader expectations would have been clarified if Malone's discussion of historiography had been placed in the introduction, rather than the conclusion of the book. Insufficient attention is given at the beginning of each chapter, as well throughout the chapters, to where the story is going. And the indications provided are sometimes misleading. In the section containing studies of three slave communities, one reads the chapter entitled "Owners and Slaves" hoping for some revelations about slave life, yet discovers the chapter is mainly about owners, as the author explains in the last paragraph.

Ultimately, this may be the book's greatest fault--it doesn't really tell much of a story of slave communities. Malone offers much information about Louisiana plantations, and she has helped point scholars to a more careful examination and perhaps redefining of the slave family. But the real subject, the lives of slaves, is unfortunately lost in the midst of statistics and models.

Carol Wilson Washington College