‘Very Fond of Spirituous Liquors’: Alcohol and Fugitive Black Life in the Slaveholding South

Abstract

ABSTRACT Hard labour, toil, and the pain and suffering of social and corporeal violence branded enslaved experiences in the slaveholding world of the plantation South. But enslaved people were also simultaneously in constant motion in the making of insuppressible alternative worlds that fundamentally endangered the fragile system of chattel slavery. In everyday acts of self-interest and refusal, enslaved people built and sustained a competing world of fugitive consciousness and practice that was often bolstered, emboldened, and reinforced by the consumption and possession of spirituous liquors. This essay treats Black people’s relationships with alcohol during the period of enslavement as an analytic for locating contestations of power and Black social life – or, an often overlooked yet revealing window into the transgressive underworlds of enslaved and fugitive making. Despite great efforts to control their bodies, movement, and intake, enslaved people poured, drank, and put alcohol to use in their creation of uncapturable moments and spaces of self-making, pleasure, sociality, and resistance. Whether joining outlaw parties, trading in forbidden clandestine economies, fleeing the confines of plantation borders, living maroon lives, or plotting and executing revolt, those sharing in these fugitive pursuits viewed alcohol as a valuable ingredient in the advancement of free life.