A Terrible Intimacy: Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

From a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, a revelatory new account of slavery, uncovering a surprising web of relationships between Black and white people that ranges far beyond the familiar template of "master-slave" dynamics

A white man hosts a wedding party for his Black servant and finds himself charged with a criminal offense; an overseer ends up dead after getting drunk with a slave; two men, one poor and white and the other enslaved, team up to plot a murder.

A Terrible Intimacy recounts six criminal cases in one Virginia county in the years preceding the Civil War. Witnesses of both races describe a startling variety of encounters between white and Black that reconfigures the binary terrain of "master-slave" relations.

Contrary to our common assumption, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived not on sprawling plantations but on small properties. Cruelty was baked into the system, yet in households of five, ten, fifteen, or twenty people, exploiters and exploited knew each other well, sharing religious worship, folkways, and complex domestic dynamics. Slaves, slave owners, overseers, and poor whites drank, played, slept, and even committed crimes together. Yet whippings happened often, enslaved families were split up, and in 1861, most white men in Prince Edward County were ready to fight to defend their right to own other human beings.

These webs of interaction make clear that white Americans recognized the humanity of their Black neighbors, even as they remained committed to a system that abused and sometimes terrorized them. Offering striking new insights into the true complexity of life in the old South, A Terrible Intimacy expands our understanding of this darkest of histories.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

This striking account from Bancroft-winning historian Ely (Israel on the Appomattox) examines interrace relations in the antebellum South at the level of daily life, revealing a more complex, and tragic, picture of slavery than is typically depicted. Ely notes that half the South's enslaved population lived in white households, rather than in slave quarters. In these shared domestic spaces, "the exploiters and the exploited knew one another personally, sometimes even intimately," and "had far more in common than we imagine today." Drawing on close readings of court cases, Ely spotlights moments when white Southerners frequented Black tradesman or shared in recreation with Black household members, or even "accepted the word of an enslaved person over other whites" or "harbored a Black fugitive who had fled from a cruel slaveholder." Such examples of mercy and clemency within a larger system of oppression, are, Ely argues, a testament to the fact that "the most appalling horror of American slavery may well be that whites... recognized the humanity of Black folk every day, yet they remained full, even avid participants in a system that abused and terrorized those very people." Animatedly told and gracefully constructed, this is a vital and unflinching look at slavery's deepest existential horrors. (Apr.)

Kirkus Book Review

Historical study of the "networks of personal connection" between Black and white people in the antebellum South. Drawing on archival data from pre--Civil War Virginia, William & Mary historian Ely charts "peculiar kinds of intimacy" that emerged in slaveholding households and communities. As Ely notes, in the two decades leading up to the Civil War, about a quarter of the South's enslaved population lived on plantations with 50 or more forced workers--"in essence, work camps, where contact with whites might be limited and mostly utilitarian." But more than half of enslaved people lived in households with fewer than 20 such laborers, putting them in more direct contact with their white enslavers. Examining court records, Ely limns several aspects of interracial engagement. His first case is that of an enslaved man who, defending himself from assault on the part of an overseer, wound up on the docket. The deceased man's sister testified that her brother was habitually drunk and violent, and other testimony held that the enslaved man, known to history only as Tom, was innocent of murder. Even so, the mores of the time essentially dictated a guilty verdict, though, as Ely shows, Tom's sentence, like about two-thirds of the sentences of Virginia's enslaved population, was commuted--meaning he was deported out of the South to "a life of banishment and bondage somewhere in the tropics." In other cases, Black people resisted various indignities, such as the breakup of the forbidden wedding of an enslaved couple, planned by both Black and white women, at the hands of white vigilantes "in direct retribution for the Black--white intimacy that produced the wedding." But in yet other cases, Ely shows, relations were much more amicable, sometimes daringly so, highlighting "the complexity of a society that encompassed millions of diverse people over the decades." A book with its share of surprises about how enslaved and enslaver found ways to navigate the "curious institution." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.