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More About This Textbook
Overview
Conventional wisdom tells us that marriage was illegal for African Americans during the antebellum era, and that if people married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is an impression that imbues beliefs about black families to this day. But it's a perception primarily based on documents produced by abolitionists, the state, or other partisans. It doesn't tell the whole story.
Drawing on a trove of less well-known sources including family histories, folk stories, memoirs, sermons, and especially the fascinating writings from the Afro-Protestant Press,'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part offers a radically different perspective on antebellum love and family life.
Frances Smith Foster applies the knowledge she's developed over a lifetime of reading and thinking. Advocating both the potency of skepticism and the importance of story-telling, her book shows the way toward a more genuine, more affirmative understanding of African American romance, both then and now.
Editorial Reviews
From the Publisher
"Her study of slave marriage does not reveal fragile, transient attachments; rather Foster uncovers a rich legacy of love, struggle, and commitment among enslaved black people. By choosing whom to love, how to love, what to sacrifice, and how long to stay committed, black Americans carved out space for their human selves even as enslavers tried to reduce them to chattel." --TheNation.com
"Illuminates the African-American historical experience of love and marriage through the stories 'that antebellum African Americans told among themselves'...[Foster] amply demonstrates that African-American marriage 'was frequent, that family ties were strong'...readers will be freshly informed." --Publishers Weekly
"This is a challenging and important text. After deconstructing our national myths about marriage and our specific assumptions about African American marriage, Foster masterfully reconstructs the reality of marriage for enslaved black people. Rather than finding a fragile institution of transient attachments, she uncovers a legacy of love, struggle, and commitment. By choosing whom to love, how to love, and what to sacrifice, black Americans carved out space for their human selves. Their marriages contributed to decades of resistance against the dehumanizing effects of slavery. Although there is not a hint of sentimentalism, this book is truly an inspiring love story." -Melissa Harris-Lacewell, author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought
"Foster does a fabulous job of countering the common narrative around black relationships with an encouraging account of enduring love that dates back even before slavery for more black couples than we ever hear about." --Statesman.com
"Foster demolishes stereotypes about the history of love, sexuality, and marriage among antebellum African Americans and issues a passionate argument for why contemporary Americans need to understand the complexity, variety, and richness of the intimate relationships forged by enslaved and free African American women and men in the past." -Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage
"Foster's book provides a significant counter-narrative to conventional scholarship and popular opinions about the pitiful state of love, marriage, and sexual morality in antebellum Black America. Her carefully researched and compelling arguments about the unwavering commitments of African Americans-both enslaved and free-to marriage and stable romantic relationships, despite almost overwhelming obstacles, is a story we have not read but need to hear. It disrupts the prevailing myth that slavery is THE primary explanation for the dismal state of marriages and male/female relationships more generally among contemporary African Americans."-Beverly Guy-Sheftall, coauthor of Gender Talk: The Struggle for Women's Equality in African American Communities
"[Foster's] discussion of free African Americans in antebellum America and the means by which they advanced ideas and ideals of love, fidelity, and the meanings of marriage and family are particularly insightful." --The Journal of American History
"Adds an important dimension to previous slave stories by concentrating specifically on the rituals leading up to marriage in the face of the legal and socio-cultural mandates of slavery and antebellum America...Foster has done an excellent job discussing a significant ritualized institution that very often gets lost in the history of Africans in America--marriage." --Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare
"An important intervention in the supposedly "common sense" approaches to discussing African American marital relationships. By disrupting the notion that forces such as death or distance could shake the commitments made by African American couples, Foster unlocks a genealogy that has the power to reshape discourses on waht is possible for African Americans in the future." --Journal of African American History
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Meet the Author
Frances Smith Foster is Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies and Emory University's 2006 Scholar/Teacher of the Year. She has been a fellow for Fulbright, the Harvard Divinity School, the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard, the International Theological Center, the Brandeis Feminist Sexual Ethics Project, and the Emory Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Religion. She has authored or edited fourteen books and dozens of articles.
Table of Contents
1. Preface
2. Adam and Eve, Antony and Isabella
3. Terms of Endearment
4. Practical Thoughts, Divine Mandates, and the Afro-Protestant Press
5. Rights and Rituals
6. Myths, Memory, and Self-Realization
7. Getting Stories Straight, Keeping Them Real
8. Alchemy of Personal Politics
Epilogue