Book Review

Canada and the United States

The heart and mind of this book concern slave demography and material culture. Through a century, and using meager sources, Lorena S. Walsh traces the pale markings of slaves who lived on a major tidewater holding (now a part of Colonial Williamsburg). Her arguments unfold in three periods: the arrival of the Africans in the 1720s-1740s; their settling during the mid-1700s and the beginnings of creolization; and their descendants' forced move west into the Shenandoah Valley and the southside in the 1780s-1790s, which probably "destroyed the small measure of security and the residential continuity that most of the Burwell group had enjoyed before the [American] Revolution" (p. 224).	1
Given the book's primary aim—to convey a sense of African cultural survivals as they shaped slave assimilation—the approach and conclusions are ambiguous but no less instructive for that. Using as a foil "the usual story" of slaves in the Chesapeake "portrayed as isolated individuals with few collective cultural resources left to counter an overwhelming, powerful, alien white presence," the argument is that acculturation was much less thorough and rapid "than is generally postulated" (pp. 76, 77, n.285). This proposal draws sustenance, principally, from the narrative of Olaudah Equiano, an Ibo who became an English abolitionist; brief ethnographic sketches of two West African cultural areas, Senegambia and the Bight of Biafra; and a long register of about 1,100 slaves including some whose African origin is assumed, given that they were named either after places or classical figures. Demographic comparisons of the 1,100 slaves underline the Africans' dismal prospects: their death rate was twice that of American-born slaves, and African women were notoriously incapable of sustaining a naturally growing population. Consequently, "cultural shock" for Africans meant the loss "irretrievably [of] many elements that held their familiar world together" (p. 77).	2
A useful shorthand regarding the problem of slavery's impact on Africans as a people and a culture is to recognize interpretations as either emphasizing features intrinsic to the slaves' own culture and community that indicate resilience and resourcefulness, or as focusing on the external factors beyond the slaves' control that damaged and made them victims. The book's thrust—but its evidence less so—is predisposed toward the former. Hence, during the Middle Passage, new Negroes bonded, thus creating the fictive kin and ensuing associations that were both "reinforced by shared national identities" and based on "shared elements of their African childhoods that continued to structure much of their [slave] world." Accordingly, they soon created quarters that "closely resembled a West African compound"; and later, as fugitives, they "envisioned escape from white control and the recreation of African communities" on the frontier (pp. 112, 113; cf. pp. 76–77).	3
These assertions raise more problems than they resolve. For instance, the best picture we have of quarters is provided by the diary of another tidewater Carter (Landon), which makes it abundantly clear that quarters were largely organized Carter's way. And, as for the pitifully inept and confused efforts of new arrivals to run away, most traveled east, not west, and so down country to deep water and the coast. Only rarely did Africans run to the frontier where maroonage—throughout the entire South—was typically brief, furtive, and wartime (the 1770s-early 1780s).	. . .