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 […]
“Anybody who spends a lot of time burrowing through primary records of the old South is going to find almost anything they can imagine & more than a little that they never imagined.”
A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South by Melvin Patrick Ely
