Past Imperfect: The Other L-Word

During centuries of enslavement, love and marriage were radical acts —
which is why it's such a shame that today's culture fails to celebrate
black love.

http://africana.com/columns/cobb/ht20040210love.asp

By William Jelani Cobb

They have been together for a millennium — or at least look as if they
have. They are seated beside each other, arms touching, him shoeless and
her head wrapped in cloth and God only knows what they've seen. They are
barely past the bitter years of slavery and to tell the truth, it's still
hard to tell the difference. The photograph is grainy and slightly out of
focus, but you can still make out the weathered lines of years and
experience on their faces. And you can still sense the connection forged of
those years.
The picture speaks of a quiet fortitude, togetherness in the crucible of
slavery, an intimacy that is rarely seen in our discussions of black
history.

Sometimes it seems like there's a civil war going on between black men and
black women.
It's ironic that Valentine's Day takes place during Black History Month,
but those two events manage to overlap without ever coinciding — as if
there is no love or romance within our collective history in this country.
We know of husbands sold away from wives and wives taken from husbands to
face the sexual exploitation of white overseers. We know of black men and
women who were bred like livestock.

But what we rarely speak of is love in the context of adversity.

The question goes loudly unasked: who needed love more than the enslaved?
Beyond the uprisings and the daily resistance, outside of the escapes,
arsons and thefts, the most subversive act committed by enslaved black
people may have been daring to love each other. The ten-plus generations of
black men and women who lived through the ordeal of slavery went to
extraordinary lengths to give meaning to their own lives, to construct
relationships that might, if only momentarily, dull the pain of forced
servitude, to care for others in a society which sought to make black love
a contradiction in terms. And that reality is all but lost in our present
love deficit.

Filtered through lens of popular media, it seems like there's a civil war
going on between black men and black women. African Americans are the least
likely segment of the population to marry and have a divorce rate that
exceeds fifty percent. We are also far less likely to remarry after a
divorce than members of other groups. Black radio's airwaves are congested
with loveless ballads; rappers boldly declare themselves love-proof — and
thereby pain-proof — and disgruntled sirens sing songs of fiscal
obligation. In an era where baby-daddies and baby-mamas replace husbands
and wives, it's easy to see the destructive legacy of slavery, segregation,
incarceration playing itself out. But that's only half of the history — and
we've never needed to hear the other side of the story more urgently.

The truth is that marriage and family were extremely important to enslaved
black people — despite the obvious difficulties that confronted their
relationships. Slave marriages were given no legal recognition, but slaves
constructed binding traditions of their own. In addition to "jumping the
broom," they also presented each other with blankets whose acceptance
indicated that they were now considered married within the community.
Others, who could not find a willing clergyman or who had been denied
permission to marry, simply married themselves. Still, recognition of their
union was important enough that ex-slaves besieged the Freedman's Bureau
with requests for marriage ceremonies after emancipation. Three Mississippi
counties accounted for 4627 marriages in a single year. The end of slavery
also brought with it literally thousands of black people wandering
throughout the South in search of husbands and wives who had been sold away
from them.

Prior to emancipation, individuals went to great lengths to maintain their
relationships. One of the most common causes of slave escapes was to see
loved ones on distant plantations. One man set out before sunrise each
Sunday morning and walked the entire day to spend a few hours with his wife
before having to walk back in time to begin the next day's work. George
Sally, enslaved on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, ignored the
slaveholder's demands and left to visit his wife — an offense for which he
was arrested. (He later stated that he did not mind being arrested for
seeing his wife.) Others risked their lives to protect their spouses. While
sexual exploitation of married black women by overseers was a constant
concern, it was not unheard of for husbands to kill whites who had attacked
their wives. One unnamed slave attacked an overseer who had attempted to
whip his wife and was himself forced to flee into the woods for eleven
months.

William Grose, a slave in Loudon County, Virginia, married a free black
woman — against the wishes of the plantation owner, who feared that she
might help him escape. William was sold to a widower in New Orleans,who
demanded that he take another woman as his wife. He wrote in his
autobiography, "I was scared half to death, for I had one wife whom I liked
and didn't want another." The couple managed to remain in contact and his
wife travelled to New Orleans and found work as a domestic in the family
that had bought William. When their relationship was discovered, she was
forced to leave New Orleans. Incredibly, William devised a plan to escape
and fled to Canada where he and his wife were reunited.

Some black couples managed, despite all odds, to construct long, close-knit
unions. In the 1930s, Barbara, a woman who was born into slavery in North
Carolina, told an interviewer the story of how she had met her husband
Frank:


I seen Frank a few times at the Holland's Methodist Church... After a while
Frank becomes a butcher and he was doing pretty good... so he comes to see
me and we courts for a year. We was sitting in the kitchen at the house
when he asks me to have him. He told me that he knows that he wasn't
worthy, but that he loved me and that he'd do anything he could to please
me and that he'd always be good to me. When I was fourteen when I got
married and when I was fifteen my oldest daughter was born. I had three
after her and Frank was as proud of them as could be. We was happy. We
lived together fifty-four years and we was always happy, having only a
little bit of argument.
Lucy Dunn, who had also been a slave in North Carolina, told a similar
tale:


It was in the little Baptist church where I first seen Jim Dunn and I fell
in love with him then, I reckons. He said that he loved me then too, but it
was three Sundays 'fore he asked to see me home. We walked that mile home
in front of my mother and I was so happy that I ain't thought it was even a
half mile. We ate cornbread and turnips for dinner and it was night before
he went home. Mother wouldn't let me walk with him to the gate, so I just
sat there on the porch and said goodnight.
He come over every Sunday for a year and finally he proposed. That Sunday
night I did walk with Jim to the gate and stood under the honeysuckles that
was smelling so sweet. I heard the big old bullfrogs a-croakin' by the
river and the whipper-wills a hollerin' in the woods. There was a big
yellow moon and I reckon Jim did love me. Anyhow, he said so and asked me
to marry him and he squeezed my hand.

She told her suitor that she would have to think about his proposal. She
and her mother spent the week discussing the seriousness of marriage. Lucy
told her mother that she understood but, "I intends to make a go of it
anyhow."

"On Sunday my mother told Jim and you ought to have seen that black boy
grin." They were married a week later. "We lived together fifty-five years
and we always loved each other... we had our fusses and our troubles, but
we trusted in the lord and we got through." The old woman wiped away tears
as she spoke of her husband. "I loved him during life and I love him now,
though he's been dead for twelve years. I thinks of him all the time, but
it seems like we're young again when I smell honeysuckles or see a yellow
moon."

One hundred and thirty-nine years past slavery, we may have something left
to learn from those enslaved generations. Near the end of her interview,
Barbara spoke a truth that may be more valid now than when she first said
it: "My mother died near twenty years ago and father died four years later.
He had not cared to live since mother left him. I've heard some of the
young people laugh about slave love, but they should envy the love which
kept mother and father so close together in life and even held them in
death."


Special thanks to Stephanie Wright and Tiffany Gill for their insights into
slave relationships.


First published: February 10, 2004

About the Author

William Jelani Cobb is an assistant professor of history at Spelman College
and editor of The Essential Harold Cruse. He can be reached at
[log in to unmask] Visit his website at www.jelanicobb.com.

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