He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715–1865, and shared the following:
Page ninety-nine of A Precarious Balance: Firearms, Race, and Community in North Carolina, 1715-1865 features an image and consequently, has limited text. The image, courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, is Alfred Waud’s 1871 sketch of “A Snipe Shooter.” This image, which is also used on the book’s cover, depicts a Black man hunting in a marsh, gun at the ready. The text on that page reads:Learn more about A Precarious Balance at the University of North Carolina Press website.The food that Major acquired for his fellow laborers was also important to him for a more personal reason. It allowed him to assume the “patriarchal mantle of provider,v and it thereby affirmed his manhood, which both his enslaver and the broader institution of slavery had otherwise deeply circumscribed. The Woods’s enslaver had sold Major’s first wife away from the plantation. It is not clear where she was sold to, but she seems to have been removed from the area, perhaps making Major part of one of the over 300,000 interstate sales…Readers who opened straight to page ninety-nine would get a glimpse of what my book is about. While there is a limited amount of text, readers would see some important themes around firearms, manhood, and race. This short section is part of my third chapter, “Armed Labor,” which highlights how free and enslaved Black people in the antebellum era used firearms in a number of labor applications. The image which dominates this page shows the quotidian nature of Black Southerners’ gun use. While rebellion and resistance are an important part of this story, free and enslaved Black people labored with their weapons, both with or without their enslavers’ or the state’s permission. This chapter explores how some enslaved men were able to provide food for their communities via hunting, which thereby bolstered their masculinity. While tangential to my book, page ninety-nine also references the interstate slave trade, which wrought havoc on enslaved Black families.
The Page 99 Test works... sort of. While it illuminates an interesting aspect of the book, my larger arguments are about how free and enslaved Black people used firearms for labor—feeding themselves and their families, protecting crops and livestock, and defending their communities from threats. Still, many white people saw firearms as yet another tool through which they could exploit Black labor. As a result, the state legislature’s laws permitted enslavers to arm their laborers from the colonial era through to Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, though some white people ignored the law or used their armed slaves for illegal purposes. Unsurprisingly, many white people were frightened at the prospect of gun-totting enslaved people. Some of their concerns were real but others were merely the anxieties of white people living in a racialized slave society. Enslaved Black folks acquired their weapons from a number of sources, ranging from their enslavers to an illegal arms trade, and were able to push back against enslavement’s constricting grasp and make better lives for themselves and their families. Firearms hold an incredibly complicated place on our current sociopolitical landscape, but our nation’s relationship with them across time is often misunderstood or intentionally mischaracterized. We should all learn more about it!
--Marshal Zeringue