She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century, and reported the following:
A reader opening to page 99 of Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty, would be dropped into the midst of an anecdote from the nineteenth century narrative of George Henry, a man whose successful escape from slavery entailed leaving a family behind.Learn more about Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty at the University of North Carolina Press website.Unlike many men who expressed emotional pain after escaping alone, Henry openly acknowledged his reasoning. He did not want his labor to maintain a slaveholder, even if that labor involved caring for kin. A wife and children who legally belonged to another person were, to Henry, “your woman and her children,” and not his own. Supporting them meant supporting slavery. Henry represents the opposite response to the catch-22 of slavery and paternal duty. He exerted his manhood by focusing on himself and refusing to provision enslaved family members.The page-99 test offers important clues, but fails to provide a full representation of the book’s main arguments and breadth. The anecdote points to the agonizing dilemmas faced by enslaved fathers. Although escape offered a path to manhood through heroic resistance, George Henry stands out as anomalous because men who escaped alone usually lived with a palpable sense of guilt. Lone escapees reveal how slavery “brutally partitioned” (146) the masculine sense of duty to self from duty to family. More importantly, a greater number of enslaved men chose to prioritize love of family over personal needs, as the anecdote on the previous page illustrates.
Patriarchal authority and legal marriage mattered, and as a free man, Henry became a devoted husband, father, and provider to his second family. After escaping, Henry married a widow with two young children. He and his wife lost two babies as infants, and Henry endeavored to care for his stepchildren, who he referred to as his children. … Individualized manhood in the context of slavery did not mean a person would continue that behavior in freedom.
This anecdote hints at the several masculine identities expressed by enslaved men. Here, Henry is more diagnostic in that he adopted different modes of manhood depending on context, moving from individualism in slavery to caretaking in freedom. Henry’s struggle to support his second family foreshadows the last two chapters, which explore the lives of African American fathers in freedom and the continued constraints on patriarchal authority as a result of discrimination and the ongoing subordination of Black masculinity.
The final paragraph of page 99 begins, “Slaveholders often manipulated enslaved men’s sense of responsibility and love of family for economic gain,” and goes on to note the contradictions between pro-slavery rhetoric and the actual actions of slaveholders. This reflects a key argument about the public and private nature of Southern masculinity. Enslaved men were occasionally allowed to exhibit masculinity within the private realm of the slave quarters, but unlike white men could not publicly display traits of manhood. This now implicit masculine hierarchy still influences contemporary attitudes toward Black men.
While a reader would get a flavor of the book, they would miss central points, including the ways enslaved fathers bypassed the constraints of slavery by provisioning ideologically, often significantly influencing their children’s sense of self. Caretaking was a subtle form of resistance that has been obscured by the denial of open patriarchal privilege to enslaved and freedmen. A reader would also miss the two chapters on sexual exploitation, white fathers of enslaved people, attitudes towards these men, and what this meant for family formation and identity.
--Marshal Zeringue
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