[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 146 (Tuesday, November 14, 2000)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2105-E2107]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       THE SKELETON IN THE CLOSET

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JOHN CONYERS, JR.

                              of michigan

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, November 14, 2000

  Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, the following is an article which appeared 
in the November 2, 2000 edition of The New York Review of Books, which 
considers the differences among African-Americans and historians as to 
how slavery should be most accurately remembered.
  Its author, George M. Fredrickson has observed that there is 
indecision among African-Americans as to how slavery should be 
remembered, which is brought about because some believe that the best 
course of action is not to act at all, in other words to forget it. 
They wish to simply neglect any detailed recollection of slavery 
because the pain of its memory is too difficult to bear. But others are 
convinced that everything about this peculiar institution should be 
brought to light. To them it seems the better course of action to 
emulate the strategy of the one ethnic group in the twentieth century, 
that was severely persecuted, but who remained determined not only to 
discuss their persecution, but to document and publicly display it by 
way of museums and oral histories and confirm for all time the 
incredible atrocities to which they were subjected.
  Over the last six years, there has been an amazing outpouring of 
literature and research concerning the enslavement of African people in 
the United States and it appears that there is still more to come. In 
the article that follows, it is made clear that the perspective of the 
historian often affected his work and made the relationship between the 
slaves and the slavemaster a matter of his, the historian's, subjective 
interpretation. It also showed how many of the attitudes that 
buttressed the institution of slavery lived beyond the reconstruction 
era and persisted not only into the post reconstruction era but into 
modern times. Because of the growing number of legislators who are 
becoming attracted to this subject and the unresolved questions that 
swirl around it, this essay and other materials that it references 
continue to illuminate this terrible part of American history. Of 
growing concern is the challenge that this new information may help us 
in a constructive way to move forward as a nation that honors diversity 
rather than leading to finger pointing and accusations that will divide 
us further. There is a growing hope that the spotlight of truth can 
lead to constructive solutions and a new appreciation of the 
significance of a diversity which is uniquely American.

                       The Skeleton in the Closet

                       (By George M. Fredrickson)


                                   1.

       One hundred and thirty-five years after its abolition, 
     slavery is still the skeleton in the American closet. Among 
     the African-American descendants of its victims there is a 
     difference of opinion about whether the memory of it should 
     be suppressed as unpleasant and dispiriting or commemorated 
     in the ways that Jews remember the Holocaust. There is no 
     national museum of slavery and any attempt to establish one 
     would be controversial. In 1995 black employees of the 
     Library of Congress successfully objected to an exhibition of 
     photographs and texts describing the slave experience, 
     because they found it demoralizing. But other African-
     Americans have called for a public acknowledgment of slavery 
     as a national crime against blacks, comparable to the 
     Holocaust as a crime against Jews, and some have asked that 
     reparations be paid to them on the grounds that they still 
     suffer from its legacy. Most whites, especially those whose 
     ancestors arrived in the United States after the emancipation 
     of the slaves and settled outside the South, do not see why 
     they should accept any responsibility for what history has 
     done to African-Americans. Recently, however, the National 
     Park Service has begun a systematic review of exhibits at 
     Civil War battlefields to make visitors aware of how central 
     slavery and race were to the conflict.
       Professional historians have not shared the public's 
     ambivalence about remembering slavery. Since the publication 
     of Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution in 1956 and 
     Stanley Elkins's Slavery in 1959, the liveliest and most 
     creative work in American historical studies has been devoted 
     to slavery and the closely related field of black-white 
     relations before the twentieth century. In the 1970s, there 
     was a veritable explosion of large and important books about 
     slavery in the Old South. But no consensus emerged about the 
     essential character of anti-bellum slavery. What was common 
     to all this work was a reaction against Stanley Elkins's view 
     that slavery devastated its victims psychologically, to such 
     an extent that it left them powerless to resist their 
     masters' authority or even to think and behave independently. 
     If slaves were now endowed with ``agency'' and a measure of 
     dignity, the historians of the Seventies differed on the 
     sources and extent of the cultural ``breathing space'' that 
     slaves were now accorded. For Herbert Gutman, it was the 
     presence among slaves of closely knit nuclear and extended 
     families; for John Blassingame, it was the distinctive 
     communal culture that emanated from the slave quarters; for 
     Eugene Genovese, it was the ability to maneuver within an 
     ethos of plantation paternalism that imposed obligations on 
     both masters and slaves.
       Clearly there was a difference of opinion between 
     Blassingame and Gutman, on one hand, and Genovese on the 
     other, about how much autonomy the slaves possessed. Genovese 
     conceded a ``cultural hegemony'' to the slaveholders that the 
     others refused to acknowledge. But even Genovese celebrated 
     ``the world that the slaves made'' within the interstices of 
     the paternalistic world that the slaveholders had made. At 
     the very least, slaves had their own conceptions of the 
     duties owed to them by their masters, which were often in 
     conflict with what the masters were in fact willing to 
     concede. Although all the interpretations found that conflict 
     was integral to the master-slave relationship, the emphasis 
     on the cultural creativity and survival skills of the slaves 
     tended to draw attention away from the most brutal and 
     violent aspects of the regime--such as the frequent and often 
     sadistic use of the lash and the forced dissolution by sale 
     of many thousands of the two-parent families discovered by 
     Gutman.
       There was also a tendency to deemphasize physical, as 
     opposed to cultural, resistance by slaves. Relatively little 
     was said about rebellion or the planning of rebellion, 
     running away, or sabotaging the operation of the plantation. 
     From the literature of the 1970s and 1980s, one might be 
     tempted to draw the conclusion that slaves accommodated 
     themselves fairly well to their circumstances and, if not 
     actually contented, found ways to avoid being miserable. Out 
     of fashion was the view of Kenneth Stampp and other neo-
     abolitionist historians of the post-World War II period that 
     the heart of the story was white brutality and black 
     discontent, with the latter expressing itself in as much 
     physical resistance as was possible given the realities of 
     white power. Interpretations of slavery since the 1970s have 
     tended to follow Genovese's paternalism model when 
     characterizing the masters or analyzing the master-slave 
     relationship and the Blassingame-Gutman emphasis on communal 
     cultural autonomy when probing the consciousness of the 
     slaves. Tension between the cultural-hegemony and cultural-
     autonomy models has been the basis of most disagreements.
       Beginning around 1990, however, a little-noticed 
     countertrend to both culturalist approaches began to emerge. 
     The work of Michael Tadman on the slave trade, Norrece T. 
     Jones on slave control, and Wilma King on slave children 
     brought back to the center of attention the most brutal and 
     horrifying aspects of life under the slaveholders' regime. 
     Tadman presented extensive documentation to show that the 
     buying and selling of slaves was so central to the system 
     that it reduces any concept of slaveholder paternalism to the 
     realm of propaganda and self-delusion. ``Slaveholder 
     priorities and attitudes suggest, instead, a system based 
     more crudely on arbitrary power, distrust, and fear,'' he 
     wrote.
       What kind of paternalist, one might ask, would routinely 
     sell those for whom he had assumed patriarchal 
     responsibility? Building on Gutman's discovery of strong 
     family ties, Jones maintained that the threat of family 
     breakup was the principal means that slaveholders used to 
     keep slaves sufficiently obedient and under control to carry 
     out the work of the plantation. There was no paternalistic 
     bargain, according to Jones, only the callous exercise of the 
     powers of ownership, applied often enough to make the threat 
     to it credible and intimidating. Like Jones, Wilma King 
     likens the master-slave relationship to a state of war, in 
     which both parties to the conflict use all the resources they 
     possess and any means, fair or foul, to defeat the enemy. She 
     compared slave children to the victims of war, denied a true 
     childhood by heavy labor requirements, abusive treatment, and 
     the strong possibility that they would be permanently 
     separated from one or both parents at a relatively early age. 
     She presented evidence to show that slave children were small 
     for their ages, suffered from ill health, and had high death 
     rates. The neo-abolitionist view of slavery as a chamber of 
     horrors seemed to be reemerging, and the horror was all the 
     greater because of the acknowledgment forced by the 
     scholarship of the Seventies that slaves had strong family 
     ties. What was now being emphasized was the lack of respect 
     that many, possibly most, slaveholders had for those ties.
       A recent book that eschews theorizing about the essential 
     nature of slavery but can be read as providing support for 
     the revisionists who would bring the darker side of slavery 
     into sharper relief is Runaway Slaves: Rebels on the 
     Plantation by John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger. This 
     relentlessly empirical study avoids taking issue with other 
     historians except to the extent that it puts quotation marks 
     around ``paternalist.'' It has little or nothing to say about 
     slave culture and community. Its principal sources are not 
     the many published narratives of escaped slaves, such as the 
     ones now made available by the Library of America, but

[[Page E2106]]

     rather newspaper accounts, legal records, and the 
     advertisements that describe runaways and offer a reward for 
     their return.
       The latter sources are especially useful because they 
     contain candid descriptions of lacerated backs, branded 
     faces, and other physical evidence of cruel treatment. Few 
     runaways actually made it to freedom in the North. Most 
     remained in relatively close proximity to their masters' 
     plantations and were eventually recaptured. It was generally 
     young men who absconded, but they did so in huge numbers. Few 
     plantations of any size failed to experience significant 
     absenteeism. Franklin and Schweninger are unable to determine 
     ``the exact number of runaways,'' but conclude very 
     conservatively that there had to have been more than 50,000 a 
     year. Slaves run off for a variety of motives--to avoid being 
     sold or because they wanted to be sold away from a harsh 
     master, to avoid family dissolution or to find kin from whom 
     they had already been separated, to avoid severe whipping or 
     as a response to it. The picture that emerges from the many 
     vivid accounts of individual acts of desertion is of an 
     inhumane system that bears no resemblance to the mythical 
     South of benevolent masters and contented slaves. It is even 
     hard to reconcile with the more sophisticated view that most 
     slaveholders conformed to a paternalistic ethic that earned a 
     conditional acquiescence from many of their slaves.
       The masters found in this book are cruel and insensitive 
     and the slaves openly rebellious. Although it rarely brought 
     freedom, the mode of resistance described in Runaway Slaves 
     could have positive results for the deserters. In some cases, 
     they successfully made their return contingent on better 
     conditions, or at least avoidance of punishment. In other 
     words, running away could be a kind of labor action, the 
     closest approximation to a strike that was possible under the 
     circumstances. Very well written, filled with engrossing 
     narrative, and exploiting valuable sources that the 
     historians of slave culture and consciousness have tended to 
     neglect, Runaway Slaves is a major work of history.


                                   2.

       But of course most slaves did not run away and some 
     plantations did not have serious problems of desertion. 
     Franklin and Schweninger might therefore be exposing only one 
     side of a complex reality. The deep discontent of the 
     deserters is obvious, but was their attitude typical or 
     exceptional? To answer this question, it would be helpful to 
     have direct testimony from slaves who stayed as well as those 
     who fled. There are two principal sources of slave 
     testimony--the published narratives from the nineteenth 
     century, some of which have been collected by William L. 
     Andrews and Henry Louis Gates for the Library of America, and 
     the interviews with elderly ex-slaves conducted in the 1930s 
     by WPA writers. Selections from the interview are now 
     available in a book-audio set, published in conjunction with 
     the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution. 
     Reading these books and listening to the tapes conveys, if 
     nothing else, a sense of how diversely slaves could be 
     treated and how variously they could respond to their 
     circumstances. The narratives written by fugitives stress, as 
     might be expected, the abuse and oppression from which their 
     authors have fled. But the WPA interview include some that 
     convey nostalgia for kindly or honorable masters and suggest 
     that paternalism could, in some instances, be an ethical code 
     as well as a rationalization for servitude.
       One could conclude therefore that some masters were genuine 
     paternalists who made their slaves grateful that their owners 
     were among the decent ones (unlike, for example, the owner of 
     a neighboring plantation who had a reputation for cruelty), 
     while others were ruthless exploiters who treated their human 
     property simply as tools of their own greed and ambition. 
     Both bodies of sources have built-in biases that detract from 
     their authority, as Franklin and Schweninger suggest in 
     explaining why they made little use of them: ``Suffice it to 
     say that many of the persons who inhabit the pages of recent 
     studies are either far removed in time and space from the 
     South they describe, or, due to conventions, or the purpose 
     of a diary, are less than candid in their observations.''
       An earlier generation of historians considered the kind of 
     narratives collected by Andrews and Gates unreliable because 
     they had allegedly been ghostwritten and embellished by white 
     abolitionists for purposes of antislavery propaganda. Recent 
     research, however, had established the authenticity of most 
     of them. Original claims for their authorship and the 
     existence of many of the people and events they describe have 
     been verified. But how representative of the slave population 
     in general were the life experiences and attitudes of these 
     literary fugitives? They had to be literate to write their 
     stories, and 95 percent of the slaves were unable to read and 
     write. Four of the six accounts of escapes from the South to 
     the North presented in Slave Narratives--those of Frederick 
     Douglass, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb, and William and 
     Ellen Craft--feature fugitives who had white fathers. Two of 
     them--Henry Bibb and Ellen Craft--were so light-skinned that 
     they were able to pass for white.
       Mulattos may have been a substantial minority of the slave 
     population of the Old South, but literate, lightskinned 
     mulattos were rare. It is nevertheless telling evidence of 
     the callousness of Southern slaveholders that most of the 
     children they sired with slave women were unacknowledged and 
     kept in servitude, rather than being emancipated by their 
     fathers, as was more likely to be the case in other slave 
     societies. To attain freedom, the fugitives of mixed race had 
     to use their degree of whitness or access to education (which 
     allowed them to forge documents) as devices for deceiving 
     their pursuers. Upon arrival in the North, their value to the 
     abolitionists came partly from the pathos that could be 
     generated among color-conscious Northerners by the thought 
     that someone who looked white or almost white could be a 
     slave, especially if she were a beautiful young woman at the 
     mercy of a lustful master. But the sexual exploitation of 
     slave women of any pigmentation was a harsh reality, as the 
     narrative of Harriet Jacobs, who sent to extrarodinary 
     lengths to avoid the embraces of her owner, clearly 
     illustrates.
       The testimony collected by WPA interviewers in the 1930s 
     suffers from very different and perhaps more severe 
     limitations. Most of it, including much of what is included 
     in Remembering Slavery, the recent selection edited by Ira 
     Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller, comes from those 
     born in slavery but emancipated as children. Very few of them 
     experienced slavery as adults and those who did were into 
     their nineties by the time they were interviewed. Seventy- or 
     eighty-year-old memories are notoriously fallible and can be 
     distorted as a result of what may have happened more 
     recently. Some of those who had lived through the era of 
     lynching and Jim Crow segregation might view their experience 
     as children who had not yet experienced the worst of slavery 
     with a certain amount of nostalgia.
       In most cases, moreover, the interviewers were Southern 
     whites, and blacks at the height of the segregation era in 
     the South would have been reluctant to express their true 
     feelings about how their inquisitors' forebears had treated 
     them. One would therefore expect the oral testimony to make 
     servitude seem more benign than it actually was. But despite 
     these inherent biases, there is in fact much evidence in 
     Remembering Slavery to support the view that slavery was 
     legalized brutality. Whipping, it is clear, was virtually 
     omnipresent. Helplessly watching a parent being severely 
     flogged was etched in the memory of many of the interviewees, 
     and a surprisingly large number had been whipped themselves 
     by masters or overseers, despite their tender ages. Sam 
     Kilgore was exceptional in having a master who never whipped 
     his slaves, but ``Marster had a method of keepin' de cullud 
     fo'ks in line. If one of dem do somethin' not right to dem he 
     say: `Don't go to wo'k tomorrow Ise 'spec de nigger driver am 
     a-comin' pass an' Ise gwine to sell youse.'''
       Whether discipline was obtained by constant use of the 
     lash, by the threat of sale for any misbehavior, or both, the 
     system revealed here is one that relied on fear and coercion 
     rather than on any sense of a patriarch's responsibility to 
     his dependents. There is also evidence in Remembering Slavery 
     of what today would be considered the most flagrant kind of 
     child abuse. Her mistress beat Henrietta King, an eight- or 
     nine-year-old accused of stealing a piece of candy, while her 
     head was secured under the leg of a rocking chair. ``I guess 
     dey must of whupped me near an hour wid dat rocker leg a-
     pressin' down on my haid,'' she recalled. As a result of the 
     pressure, her face and mouth were permanently and severely 
     disfigured.
       In the light of such evidence, it is not readily apparent 
     why Ira Berlin's introduction affirms that a paternalistic 
     ethic prevailed among slaveholders. Was it really true in 
     most cases that ``the incorporation of slaves into what 
     planters called their `family, black and white,' enhanced the 
     slaveholders' sense of responsibility for their slaves and 
     encouraged the owners to improve the material conditions of 
     plantation life''? Material conditions did improve during the 
     nineteenth century, but an alternative explanation is 
     available: slaves were valuable property that was 
     appreciating in value. In the light of their financial 
     interest in healthy, marketable slaves, the real questions 
     might be why conditions on the plantations were often so 
     harsh. A slave scarred by whipping depreciated in value, but 
     whippings persisted; slave children were an appreciating 
     asset; but, if Wilma King is correct, they were generally 
     unhealthy and undernourished. (An image from more than one 
     account in Remembering Slavery is that of slave children 
     being fed at a trough like pigs.)
       Paternalism in one sense of the word may be a byproduct of 
     vast difference in power. Those who present no conceivable 
     threat to one's security, status, or wealth may be treated 
     with condescending and playful affection. It is clear from 
     some of the recollections in Remembering Slavery that 
     attractive slave children could became human pets of their 
     masters and mistresses. Mature slaves who ``played Sambo'' 
     could also arouse feelings of indulgence and receive special 
     treatment. But the possession of great power over other human 
     beings can also provoke irrational cruelty. The other side of 
     the coin of paternalism in this psychological sense is 
     sadism.
       Berlin is on stronger ground when be notes that ``the 
     paternalist ideology provided slaveholders with a powerful 
     justification for their systematic appropriation of the 
     slaves' labor.'' But the racism that made it possible to 
     consider blacks as subhuman was another possible 
     justification. The two could be synthesized in the notion 
     that blacks were perpetual children and had to be treated as 
     such

[[Page E2107]]

     no matter what their actual ages. But if this was the 
     dominant view it did not prevent a substantial amount of 
     child abuse.


                                   3.

       Slave children are the subjects of Marie Jenkins Schwartz's 
     Born in Bondage. It covers much of the same ground as Wilma 
     King's Stolen Childhood, but in its effort to understand the 
     master-slave relationship it leans toward the paternalism 
     model more than toward the ``state-of-war'' analogy invoked 
     by King and Norrece Jones. Consequently it presents a 
     somewhat less horrific impression of what it meant to grow up 
     on a slave plantation. It acknowledges the possibility of 
     sale for adolescent slaves, noting that approximately 10 
     percent of them were sold from the upper to lower South 
     between 1820 and 1860. But in claiming that ``the risk of 
     separation from families through sale was relatively low for 
     very young children,'' it disregards the frequent sale of men 
     without their wives and young children or of women with 
     infants without their husbands that is acknowledged elsewhere 
     in the book. Schwartz's conclusion that ``slaves throughout 
     the South worried about being sold'' seens like an 
     understatement in the light of what Norrece Jones has 
     revealed about how masters manipulated intense fears of 
     family separation to maintain discipline.
       The conception of paternalism found in Born in Bondage is 
     set forth in terms very close to those employed by Eugene 
     Genovese. ``The paternalistic bargain that slaveholders and 
     slaves struck,'' Schwartz writes, ``required each to give 
     something to the other. Slaves displayed loyalty to their 
     owners, at least outwardly, and slaveholders rewarded this 
     with better treatment,'' She concedes that ``the 
     paternalistic attitude of owners was not the same thing as 
     real benevolence'' and that the slaves, aware of its self-
     serving nature, obeyed masters and mistresses ``without 
     internalizing the owner's understanding of class and race.'' 
     But playing the prescribed deferential roles made life easier 
     and must have become second nature for some. Children were 
     quick to see the benefit of pleasing their owners, and the 
     sheer presence of large numbers of children on most 
     plantations was one factor encouraging a paternalistic ethos.
       Putting aside the unresolved question of whether sincere 
     and durable ``paternalistic bargains'' were normal or 
     exceptional in slave governance, Schwartz makes the original 
     and useful point that there was an inherent conflict between 
     such paternalism (to whatever extent it may have existed) and 
     the efforts of slaves to maintain a family life of their own. 
     To the degree that masters took direct responsibility for 
     slave children they undermined the authority of the parents 
     and the unity of the slave family. But how likely in fact 
     were slave owners to play such a role in the raising of slave 
     children? Little evidence of this kind of attentiveness 
     appears in the written and oral narratives. Accounts of slave 
     children running about naked or in rags, being fed at 
     troughs, or put to work at a very early age run counter to 
     the impression of slaveholders acting in loco parentis. 
     Although it offers some significant new insights, Born in 
     Bondage should not displace Wilma King's Stolen Childhood and 
     be taken as the definitive last word on growing up under 
     slavery. Rather the two books should be read together as 
     revealing different aspects of a complex reality.
       Perhaps the time has come to get beyond the debate between 
     the two schools of thought about the nature of antebellum 
     slavery--the seemingly unresolvable disagreement over whether 
     it can best be understood as resting on a ``paternalistic 
     bargain'' between masters and slaves or simply on the 
     application of force and fear in the service of economic 
     gain. The reality reflected in the slave narratives and other 
     primary sources is of great variation in plantation regimes. 
     What proportion might be classified as paternalist and what 
     proportion was based simply on ``arbitrary power, distrust, 
     and fear'' cannot be quantified; it is a question that can be 
     answered only on the basis of general impressions that will 
     differ, depending on which sources are deemed representative 
     and which anomalous. The side that a historian supports might 
     be determined more by ideology or theoretical approach than 
     by a careful weighing of the evidence.
       It also seems possible that many slaveholders could fancy 
     themselves as paternalists and act in ways that were totally 
     at odds with their self-image. Walter Johnson's book on the 
     slave market, Soul by Soul, in effect transcends the 
     dichotomy by showing that a culture of paternalism and a 
     commitment to commercialism were not incompatible. He also 
     undermines another persistent and contentious either/or of 
     Southern historiography, one that also involves the status of 
     paternalism as ideology and social ethos. This is the 
     question of whether ``race'' (inequality based on 
     pigmentation) or ``class'' (stratification based on pre-
     modern conceptions of honor and gentility) was central to the 
     culture and social order of the Old South.
       Johnson takes us inside the New Orleans slave market, the 
     largest and busiest in the South, and discovers that the 
     buyers and sellers of slaves could easily mix the language 
     and values associated with paternalism and commercialism. 
     Unlike later historians, they saw no conflict between their 
     needs for status and sound business practice. ``I consider 
     Negroes too high at this time,'' one slave owner told 
     another, ``but there are some very much allied to mine both 
     by blood and inter-marriage that I may be induced from 
     feeling to buy, and I have one vacant improved plantation, 
     and could work more hands with advantage.'' Clearly the 
     purchasers of slaves liked to think that they were doing a 
     favor to those they acquired. They could buy themselves ``a 
     paternalist fantasy in the slave market'' when they made a 
     purchase that seemed to accord with the wishes of the person 
     being bought, despite the fact that it could also be 
     justified on strictly economic grounds. But, Johnson 
     comments, ``the proslavery construction of slave-market 
     ``paternalism'' was highly unstable: it threatened to 
     collapse at any moment beneath the weight of its own 
     absurdity. One could go to the market and buy slaves to 
     rescue them from the market, but it was patently obvious . . 
     . that the market in people was what had in the first place 
     caused the problems that slave-buying paternalists claimed to 
     resolve.''
       Paternalism, Johnson concludes, was ``a way of imagining, 
     describing, and justifying slavery rather than a direct 
     reflection of underlying social relations.'' It was therefore 
     ``portable'' and could ``turn up in the most unlikely 
     places--in slaveholders' letters describing their own benign 
     intentions as they went to the slave market.'' Paternalism 
     was an illusion but one that was essential to the self-
     respect of many slaveholders, just as hardheaded commercial 
     behavior was essential to their economic prosperity and 
     social pretensions. As portrayed by Johnson, the slaves were 
     not taken in by paternalistic rhetoric. But they could 
     influence their own destiny in the slave market by the way 
     they presented themselves: ``The history of the antebellum 
     South is the history of two million slave sales. But 
     alongside the chronicle of oppressions must be set down a 
     history of negotiations and subversions.'' Slaves brought to 
     market could subvert their sale to undesirable purchasers by 
     feigning illness or acting unruly and uncooperative, or, 
     putting on a different mask, encourage their purchase by 
     masters who had a reputation for good treatment or who 
     already possessed some of their kinfolk. This form of black 
     ``agency'' might be considered less decisive or heroic than 
     the running away described by Franklin and Schweninger, but 
     ``these differences between possible sales had the salience 
     of survival itself.''
       On the question of whether slavery and the Old South should 
     be characterized by race or by class domination, Johnson 
     suggests that both were present and that it is impossible to 
     distinguish between them in their day-to-day manifestations. 
     He advances the original and potentially controversial 
     argument that to be truly ``white'' in the Old South one had 
     to own slaves. Buying a first slave therefore brought racial 
     status as well as a new class position. I would qualify the 
     argument by limiting its application to ``black belt'' or 
     plantation areas where a substantial majority of whites 
     actually owned slaves. In the Southern backcountry and 
     uplands, where nonslaveholding yeomen farmers predominated, 
     the social ``whiteness'' of anyone who was not black or 
     Indian was beyond question, and it was even possible to 
     regard slaveholding itself as compromising whiteness by 
     creating too much intimacy between the races.
       Johnson also contends that differences in pigmentation were 
     a major element in the expectations that purchasers had about 
     the use they could make of the slaves they bought. Dark-
     skinned slaves were considered healthier and better suited to 
     field labor. Male slaves who were light-skinned but not too 
     light were thought to be good candidates for training in 
     skilled trades. Very light-skinned males were difficult to 
     sell, however, because of the fear that they could escape by 
     passing for white (as Henry Bibb's narrative well 
     exemplifies). Very light-complexioned females, on the other 
     hand, brought high prices as ``fancy women'' or concubines. 
     This was a color and class hierarchy more often associated 
     with Latin America and the Caribbean than with America's 
     characteristic two-category, white-over-black pattern of race 
     relations. But Johnson argues that the physical aspect of the 
     classification of slaves into different occupational groups 
     was highly subjective and that observers described the 
     pigmentation of slaves differently depending on what use they 
     intended to make of them.
       To some extent this was undoubtedly true. But it defies 
     common sense to claim without qualification that ``the 
     racialized meaning of [a slave's body], the color assigned to 
     it and the weight given to its various physical features in 
     describing it, depended up the examiner rather than the 
     examined.'' It is a useful postmodern insight that race and 
     color are, to a considerable extent, ``social 
     constructions.'' But surely the differences between very 
     light and very dark skin was a physical fact that had an 
     independent effect on the evaluations being made. Except for 
     this one instance, however, Johnson's discussion of the 
     social and cultural construction of reality by whites and 
     blacks in the slave market does not do violence to the 
     inescapable external realities that limited the options and 
     influenced the behavior of the buyers, the sellers, and the 
     sold. By beginning the process of undermining and 
     transcending the sharp dichotomies between paternalism and 
     commercialism, and between race and class--on which 
     historians of the Old South have been fixated for so long--
     Johnson has advanced the study of African-American slavery to 
     a higher level.