Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Daniel Vickers, University of California, San Diego

The Waterman's Song is a fine study of African American history that joins a growing chorus describing the complexity and variety of life under slavery. It is also a species of maritime history, but not one that follows its subject in conventional terms. Most readers will place this book with their slavery or southern history collection; I put it on my maritime shelf and would like to explain why.	1
The first part of The Waterman's Song, entitled "Working on the Water," describes in absorbing, concrete detail the many different forms of maritime labor that African Americans performed on the North Carolina coast from the early eighteenth century down to the period of the Civil War. As David Cecelski explains, very few slaves or free blacks worked on the water throughout the year; for most it was part-time labor, sandwiched into seasons when they could be spared from the normal routine of plantation agriculture or practiced during those odd hours in the day they could obtain or steal from their master. The variety of water-borne activities pursued by African Americans is remarkable; the first half of the book is in large degree simply a record of these. Fishing occupied a lot of their time: sometimes in a casual manner for their masters' tables or for themselves—picking terrapins out of the saltwater marshes along shore or putting down fish baskets on river bottoms to trap catfish and eels—but also on a more ambitious commercial scale, setting massive seines in the estuaries of freshwater rivers to catch shad in the spring, chasing the jumping mullet around the Outer Banks in the summertime, or tonguing for oysters in the winter. Other slaves worked in coastal and river transport, poling or towing flats and bateaux upstream and down, piloting a range of different single-masted sailing craft around the sounds, or sailing in larger sloops and schooners to more distant ports along the Atlantic coast. The brutal, even deadly, labor of canal building through the lowcountry swampland was the unfortunate lot of still other African Americans who lived around the shore. Cecelski does a marvelous job of imaginative history in recreating this working world. Though I have never laid eyes on Pamlico or Albemarle Sounds, they came alive for me.	2
The author's goals, however, are not merely descriptive. He argues that the ubiquity of maritime labor along the coast gave a distinctive flavor to African American life there. Canal building aside, black people liked working on the water. Although they were still in the employ of their masters, who enjoyed most if not all the fruits of their labor, the relative autonomy they enjoyed—far from drivers and foremen and often under the command of other slaves—was a welcome relief from regular drudgery. The work carried them into fresh territory, brought them into contact with other African Americans (slave and free), and allowed them to know more about the world, including reports of slave resistance and revolt as well the news of abolitionist thought and political action elsewhere in the United States and abroad. Partly because of its complex and often impenetrable geography and partly because of its integration into the wider world of the Atlantic, maritime North Carolina became fertile ground in which freedom's ideals could germinate.	. . .