Kinship

In the face of sometimes insurmountable odds, enslaved people made great efforts to maintain family ties. Because men and women were property within the U.S. slave-holding system, they could be bought, sold, or given away on a whim. Slave marriages were not legally binding under the law. Instead, men and women had to establish consensual unions that could be dissolved at any time. Husbands and wives faced constant threat of being sold away from each other. Similarly, enslaved children belonged not to their parents, but solely to the master. However, enslaved men and women did not rely solely upon these familial relationships. Instead, the descendants of African men and women maintained a cultural tradition of intricate extended family networks. Father, mother, and siblings were not the only measure of the concept of family.

Enslaved people maintained a broad network of equally important blood and fictive kin ties. Blood kin were relatives who were directly related to an individual. This extended family consisted of parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, great-grandparents and, in the case of the iconic photograph of the family on Smith's Plantation in Beaufort, South Carolina, great-great-grandparents. Fictive or "play" kin were non blood kin who were treated like blood kin. These men and women were addressed by names generally reserved for family, such as "Mama," "Papa," "Uncle," "Aunt," "Brother," "Sister," and "Cousin."

Although the terms Uncle and Aunt are the same ones used by whites, they are emblematic of a lack of respect for enslaved men and women. All black men and women were "Aunt" and "Uncle" because they could not be referred to as "Mrs.," "Mr.," or "Miss." However, in the enslaved community, the bonds of fictive kin meant something entirely different. Fictive kin were closer than friends. In some cases, they were able to stand in for blood kin and were respected as such for taking care of children to whom they were not related, and when necessary disciplining them as well. Former slave Allen Allensworth related to his biographer that his fictive aunt Phyllis stood in for his mother when he was sold from the Upper South to the Lower South as a child. She volunteered to care for him like a mother as he had been, for all practical purposes, orphaned by law. As a result, young Allensworth felt an attachment to Aunt Phyllis for the rest of his life. Similarly, Harriet Jacobs spoke fondly of her fictive uncle Fred, who wished to learn to read the Bible. He had no money, but gave Jacobs fruit as payment for her instruction.

Extended families could be maintained because of the housing arrangements of the enslaved on plantations. At Monticello, the enslaved lived in houses along the south side of Mulberry Row. At the Hermitage, the duplex style homes of the Field Quarters housed many family groups. These homes were separated by a thin wall with separate entrances. Family groups lived on either side. Edmund Jenings's plantations had "dwelling houses" and "quarters" both of which housed large groups of enslaved people. On the Sea Islands, a style of enslavement had developed wherein the master of the plantation remained in Charleston during the summer months to avoid the unhealthy atmosphere; the duplex style of home was used to keep large groups of enslaved people together and, with an absentee master, families prospered.

These kinship ties did not stop at the property lines of plantations. Extended kinship groups spread from plantation to plantation. Ex-slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass remembered fondly that his mother, who lived on another plantation, walked 12 miles each way at night to tuck him into bed. She would stay with him through the night and leave early in the morning to walk back to her plantation in time for work the next day. As a result, Douglass recalled that he never saw his mother's face by the light of day.

Historian Herbert Gutman wrote one of the definitions of kin involved being shaped by "[f]amily and kinship patterns of belief and behavior associated with traditional West African tribal societies" (1977, p. 223). Although Gutman did not go into great detail about the topic in his text, he said that West African societies from which the enslaved men and women of America were descended placed high value on extended family and family ties. In the United States nuclear families were disrupted frequently because of sale or other factors, and the extended family was created by enslaved African American men and women using wisps of the West African family structure as a way to maintain family ties.

Recent scholars dispute Gutman's argument. Instead of having a broad-minded way of looking at family and kinship ties—acknowledging that a nuclear family headed by a father is not the only type of family organization that exists—historians have narrowly defined the family. In earlier scholarship, historians were concerned with recreating and identifying all members of the enslaved nuclear family. An unrecorded father was written off as "not listed," and his absence was given as evidence of the weakness of the African American family under enslavement. West African family structures do not look like Western European family structures. In West African cultures there is a long tradition of extended family relationships. Family ties were centered on extended family with male and females as coheads instead of a family group based upon immediate family with a father as head of household. Additionally, as Gutman noted, maternal uncles and aunts were generally at the heads of these family groups rather than fathers and mothers. The West African model of family was secondary to the extended family network.

As a result, contemporary scholarship has suggested that earlier scholars were incorrect in their assumptions that extended families replaced nuclear families for enslaved people. Extended families were not an adaptive form of family groups because the notion of extended family was not a foreign one to people of African descent in America. Their ancestors brought this cultural tradition with them from the West African nation-states from which they came. Therefore the notion of African Americans scrambling to create a family structure as a result of enslavement is not entirely accurate. Europeans could not destroy a family structure that was not the norm for enslaved families of African descent.

These notions of the value of extended family from West Africa and valuing this system over the system of a nuclear family promoted the extended family system, which provided a built-in safety net for enslaved people who could be separated from either blood or fictive kin at the whim of their masters. The bonds of kinship were so sound that to avoid separation, men and women escaping slavery often went to live with kin on other plantations. Children escaped to be with their parents, husbands and wives escaped together, and, in the cases of enslaved people who were particularly skilled at running away, they would frequently return to the plantations from which they had come.

Certain other traditions of kinship were not developed or transformed in America, but instead brought from Africa and manifested in the New World. In traditional West African societies, status comes with age. The older a person is, the more respect they are owed. Elders are closest to ancestors and, because of their life experience, are entitled to esteem. In the New World masters noted that a disapproving look from an elder in the enslaved community was more effective than a beating to keep young people in line. Elders in the community were responsible for maintaining order. Jacobs wrote of her grandmother, who was called Aunt Marthy in the enslaved community, and was well known and respected in among them for her intelligence, skills in food preparation and cheery personality. Moses Roper's grandmother visited him every day and brought him food while he was imprisoned for escaping. Grandy's elderly mother had food brought to her by her children and "other near relations" nightly.

Furthermore, intergenerational bonds were strengthened by naming practices. Enslaved people named their children after fathers, grandparents, and, infrequently, mothers. Children were also given the name of cousins.

Having a large extended family had many benefits and few drawbacks. Family provided refuge from the cruelties of slavery. Kin networks supported and promoted mutual obligations. These obligations ensured that children were clothed, fed, loved, and cherished, the elderly were taken care of, and people of all ages had a sense of connection and nurturing in a community larger than themselves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, with Related Documents, [1845] ed. David W. Blight. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2003.

Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Gutman, Herbert George. The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925. New York: Vintage, 1977.

Joyner, Charles W. Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Morgan, Philip D. Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

                                         Tanya Mears