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Full Description
Old Age and American Slavery explores how antebellum southerners, Black and white, adapted to, resisted, or failed to overcome changes associated with old age, both real and imagined. Slavery was a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, both of which were affected by concerns with age. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the aging process and dealt with elders, David Stefan Doddington emphasizes the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. In connecting old age to the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, enslavers, and their propagandists, the book reveals how representations of old age, and experiences of aging, spoke to wider struggles relating to mastery, paternalism, resistance, and survival in slavery. The book asks us to rethink long-standing narratives relating to networks of solidarity in the American South and it illuminates the violent and exploitative nature of American slavery.
Contents
Acknowledgements; Introduction: Old Age and American Slavery; Part I. The Enslaved: 1. 'As to those more advanced in life': Old Age in Slavery; 2. 'Old and broken now; no tongue can tell how much I suffer': Sale, Abandonment, and Neglect; 3. 'Young people think that old people are fools but old people know that young people are fools': Intergenerational Conflict among the Enslaved; 4. 'Don't kill such an old creature as I': Old Age and Community Tension; 5. 'You won't notice me now but you'll wish you had': Conjure, Community, and Intergenerational Conflict; 6. 'The summer of my life was passing away': Resistance, Old Age, and Surviving Slavery; Part II. Enslavers: 7. 'Old God damn son-of-a-bitch, she gone on down to hell': Elderly Enslavers and Enslaved Resistance; 8. 'They are getting too old and weak': Aged Mastery and White Conflict; 9. 'Something must be done with the old man': Dominion after Death; 10. 'Let our women and old men... be disabused of the false and unfounded notion that slavery is sinful': Emancipation Contested; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
