A Terrible Intimacy
Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory new account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of “master-slave” dynamics
A white man hosts a wedding party for his Black servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer ends up dead after getting drunk with a slave; two men, one poor and white and the other enslaved, team up to plot a murder.
A Terrible Intimacy recounts six criminal cases in one Virginia county in the years preceding the Civil War. Witnesses of both races describe a startling variety of encounters between white and Black that reconfigures the binary terrain of “master-slave” relations.
Contrary to our common assumption, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, yet in households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and complex domestic dynamics. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861, most white men in Prince Edward County were ready to fight to defend their right to own other human beings.
These webs of interaction make clear that white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that abused and sometimes terrorized them. Offering striking new insights into the true complexity of life in the old South, A Terrible Intimacy expands our understanding of this darkest of histories.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
There is a perception about the antebellum South that enslaved people lived at a great remove from slaveholders, making it easier for the owners to dehumanize the enslaved. But through painstaking research, Melvin Patrick Ely illustrates how, in fact, many of the people who enslaved others actually lived and worked with them closely. Diving into a handful of well-documented court cases, he translates testimony, correspondence, and other documents for a modern audience, giving us a well-preserved window into how people really lived. We read about white owners and overseers regularly relaxing, worshipping, and living under the same roofs as the enslaved. They often trusted in the opinions of enslaved people and sought out the talents of Black tradesmen. And as Ely insightfully illustrates, these revelations make it even more disturbing that white slaveholders still inflicted terror and violence on people they were so intimately familiar with.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This striking account from Bancroft-winning historian Ely (Israel on the Appomattox) examines interrace relations in the antebellum South at the level of daily life, revealing a more complex, and tragic, picture of slavery than is typically depicted. Ely notes that half the South's enslaved population lived in white households, rather than in slave quarters. In these shared domestic spaces, "the exploiters and the exploited knew one another personally, sometimes even intimately," and "had far more in common than we imagine today." Drawing on close readings of court cases, Ely spotlights moments when white Southerners frequented Black tradesman or shared in recreation with Black household members, or even "accepted the word of an enslaved person over other whites" or "harbored a Black fugitive who had fled from a cruel slaveholder." Such examples of mercy and clemency within a larger system of oppression, are, Ely argues, a testament to the fact that "the most appalling horror of American slavery may well be that whites... recognized the humanity of Black folk every day, yet they remained full, even avid participants in a system that abused and terrorized those very people." Animatedly told and gracefully constructed, this is a vital and unflinching look at slavery's deepest existential horrors.
