When people think of slavery in the American South, they usually imagine vast, intensely segregated plantations. However, usually Black people and their White enslavers lived cheek by jowl, and this terrible intimacy could give rise to many different kinds of tensions, as demonstrated by the six court cases covered in this book.
Most of what I know about slavery in the United States was learned in the long ago days of high school and before, so I chose to pick up this book to both reacquaint myself with the topic, as well as learn more about what everyday life was like in that time.
The author closely analyses six court cases involving the interplay between free White people and enslaved Black people in a specific Virginia county, including crimes like murder, rape, and, unexpectedly, hosting a party for a number of enslaved people without their owners’ permission. The author presents the transcripts from these trials but adds plenty of context, which allows the reader to follow the exact sentiments and thoughts expressed by the witnesses but still understand the broader picture.
Sometimes the reading of the long transcripts can get tedious, and I would get confused about who exactly was testifying. Though the author does his best to break things up, I would still occasionally lose track of what was going on in the longer trials especially. The parameters of the sample of cases presented is also pretty small – while the narrow geographical location does allow you to compare and contrast them, I would have liked for the author to tell us a bit about similar cases which may have happened in other areas of the American south, and give us insight in that way too.
The audiobook is narrated by Janina Edwards and Ron Butler, with Edwards reading court transcripts and Butler the authorial analysis. I appreciated the multi-narrator approach, as it would have definitely gotten confusing to tell the two apart otherwise.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley. This is my honest and voluntary review.
