“Sweeping in scope, powerfully written, and overflowing in dramatic insight, What Sorrows Labour in My Parents’ Breast? is a major contribution to U.S. Family Studies and African American social and cultural history.”
The legacy of the slave family haunts the status of black Americans in modern U.S. society. Stereotypes that first entered the popular imagination in the form of plantation lore have continued to distort the African American social identity. In What Sorrows Labour in My Parents' Breast?, Brenda Stevenson provides a long overdue concise history to help the reader understand this vitally important African American institution as it evolved and survived under the extreme opposition that the institution of slavery imposed. The themes of this work center on the multifaceted reality of loss, recovery, resilience and resistance embedded in the desire of African/African descended people to experience family life despite their enslavement. These themes look back to the critical loss that Africans, both those taken and those who remained, endured, as the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley honors in the line—“What sorrows labour in my parents’ breast?,” and look forward to the generations of slaves born through the Civil War era who struggled to realize their humanity in the recreation of family ties that tied them, through blood and emotion, to a reality beyond their legal bondage to masters and mistresses. Stevenson pays particular attention to the ways in which gender, generation, location, slave labor, the economic status of slaveholders and slave societies’ laws affected the black family in slavery.
“What Sorrows Labour in My Parents’ Breast? shows how African Americans lived family; how it structured religion, resistance, recreation, sex, separation and death. It is an essential read for those seeking to understand African American History and identity.”
“Brenda Stevenson’s erudite exploration of a vast array of sources-legal records, archaeological evidence, vidual sources, and the testimony of enslaved people-conveys the diversity, complexity and persistence of Black family forms across centuries of bondage under multiple colonial systems.”