“Little Boats” in the Storm: Racial Ambiguity and Gender in Two Postemancipation Adoptions

Abstract

Exactly what transgression Mary Ann Lamb committed is unknown, but adoptive parents, Loren and Nancy Thompson, considered them serious things we had to reprove for. Lamb, young black woman of about 20, had visited city of Kingston, Jamaica, to bid Thompsons farewell as they departed for their native home in United States (Thompson 1858b). They left behind and did not return for more than year. Perhaps Thompsons caught Lamb drinking rum with friends. Perhaps she flirted. Or perhaps she rebuked Thompsons for leaving her (Kenny 2010,192). Whatever she did, it clearly contravened gendered etiquette by which Thompsons, white emissaries of American Missionary Association in postemancipation Jamaica, lived and that they sought to cultivate among their congregants.In 1875, another daughter rebelled. Writing to guardian, radical Republican carpetbagger Albion Tourgee, nineteen-year-old Adaline Pattillo announced intention to withdraw from Hampton Institute, where she had been enrolled for four years. She would instead return to Yanceyville, North Carolina, where biological mother, Louisa, and sister, Mary, remained. Motivated by guilt and loyalty, Pattillo had decided to devote time to them. Tourgee had envisioned very different path for Ada, as he called her. Although Pattillo was born slave, Tourgee expected that formal education would provide middle-class respectability, and perhaps limited, gender-appropriate public role, joining white reformers in uplifting (Elliott 2006). Tourgee had moved Pattillo into his North Carolina home in 1869, directed his wife, Emma, to educate her, and sent to Hampton, with this result in mind (Elliott 2006; Woods 2013). Pattillo had other plans for both herself and blood relatives. do want, she stressed with an underline, in an unequivocal expression of insistence, a home of our own & I will not feel content until I get one (Pattillo 1875).Although separated by seventeen years and nearly two thousand miles, these two acts of rebellion reveal what was possibly common outcome of transracial adoption in postemancipation societies. Historically, family has been primary site in which racial and gender ideologies of its members, including children, are formed. The phenomenon holds true for end of slavery in Anglophone Atlantic (Scully and Paton 2005). Concepts of race in nineteenth century partly relied on notion that the filiation of individuals transmits from generation to generation substance both biological and spiritual and thereby inscribes them in temporal community known as 'kinship' (Balibar 1991, 100). Thus, disruption of this genealogical scheme by transfer of nonwhite subjects from black households to those of white reformers raises questions concerning how racial and gender subjectivities of freedchildren were affected.1 Transracial adoptees lived on cusp of two families, included fully in neither. By examining these arrangements from perspectives of children, adopters, and, where sources allow, biological mothers who sought to reclaim their offspring, present essay will show that result for children in question manifested in conflicted identities and an ambiguous sense of place within race and gender categories.The early decades of freedom provide fruitful sites of examination for these phenomena. Before emancipation, abolitionists frequently criticized effects of bondage on enslaved families (Dixon 1997) but had little to no power to directly intervene. Slavery's demise provided reformers like Tourgees and Thompsons degree of access to governance of black children that property rights of slaveholders had hitherto largely prevented. Moreover, adoptions occurred when racial hierarchies that many had once assumed stable were undone. Transracial adoption, Mark Jerng argues, was most common when national traumas focused on formation of. …