Introduction

Thavolia Glymph

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511812491.001

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012

Thavolia Glymph

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Thavolia Glymph: Affiliation:
Duke University, North Carolina

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Summary

At the deepest levels of a man's being it cannot make sense that he should voluntarily labor for those whose style of thinking declares them to be his enemies and whose triumph in the management of human affairs remain a persistent threat to the dignity of his person.

George Lamming

Tranquility and violence coexist.

Eric Hobsbawm

“The word home has died upon my lips.” Writing to her son in late June 1865, Mary Jones summed up one outcome of the Civil War. Decades later, Katie Rowe remembered another. “It was de fourth day of June in 1865 I begins to live.” Without slaves to do the work of her home, Jones's world, her home, was dead. In that death, Katie Rowe saw life and a future to claim as her own. As a former mistress and a former slave, Jones and Rowe stood opposite each other in 1865. Once connected by the institution of slavery, they now faced a common task: to build new lives on the ground of freedom. Both were transformed. This book recounts that transformation. It is a story of freedom and unfreedom, race and gender, and nation and citizenship in the world of the nineteenth-century American South. That big abstract story is composed of equally big personal stories, from a woman's right to choose the dress she will wear to her right to live.

The story properly begins before the war, when enslaved and slaveholding women related to each other on the ground of slavery.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Out of the House of Bondage
The Transformation of the Plantation Household
, pp. 1 - 17

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511812491.001 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2003

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