Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina. By Rebecca J. Fraser. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. x, 137 pp. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-934110-07-2.)

Abstract

Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina is a slim volume that traces how enslaved people negotiated the intimate relations of courtship and marriage within the confines of the nineteenth-century slave-labor system. Rebecca J. Fraser combines Works Progress Administration narratives, family papers, ex-slave narratives, and folklore with integrated historiography to provide an accessible analysis of the role of courtship in the daily contestations and experiences of slavery. The book is divided into thematic chapters that explore various aspects of courtship in slave communities. Chapter 1 begins with a longue durée overview of Euro-American stereotypes of Africans and African Americans as largely oversexual, animalistic, and childlike—in short, supposedly incapable of higher emotions such as love. Chapter 2, one of the most analytical chapters, traces the competing spheres of influences (slaveholders, families, friends, churches) on individuals’ romantic relationships. Chapter 3 moves more squarely to the experience of courtship, looking at the “semi-autonomous social world” of nighttime frolics, corn shucking, and other carved-out occasions for enslaved people to socialize away from slaveholder regulation (p. 64). Chapter 4 continues the focus on enslaved lives to look at courtships as part of a narrative of resistance, suggesting that intimate relationships provided opportunities for male performance of honor and courage. Chapter 5 briefly examines the significance of wedding rituals that served both to emulate and resist white gender norms.