Speaking for the Enslaved by Antoinette T Jackson

Author:Antoinette T Jackson [Jackson, Antoinette T]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Political Science, Public Policy, Cultural Policy, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology & Cognition, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Anthropology, General, Archaeology, Customs & Traditions, Sociology, Technology & Engineering, Agriculture
ISBN: 9781315419961
Google: qrRmDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-06-16T05:10:34+00:00

CULTURAL PRESERVATION IN ANTEBELLUM PLANTATION SPACES

This chapter critically examines categorization as an active process of knowledge construction that directly influences ways in which we interpret the past and, more important, create interpretations for future generations. One outcome of reinterpreting the labor practices is that sharecropper, as a fixed and universally representative laborer category of descendants of enslaved Africans and one that legitimizes and reinforces notions of dependency, is disrupted. Instead, we find descendants’ interpretations of their own work lives and roles as laborers are much broader. However, the sharecropper label is just one example of how categorizations misrepresent how descendants of enslaved Africans understood their occupational statuses in Mount Pleasant. Some narratives also reveal how limited terminology about and limited understanding of labor roles obscure the skilled nature of labor that Africans performed and masks cultural continuity and agency expressed on a family and community level. There was an intergenerational transmission of knowledge about foodways and labor practices that still marks cultural preservation practices in African communities in former antebellum plantation spaces.

Whenever I spoke to long-time African-American residents of Mount Pleasant, they consistently stated: “We were never sharecroppers.” After I examined tourist literature, local history accounts, and academic sources, their reasons for contesting the sharecropper label became obvious. In public historical profiles, descendants of enslaved Africans were represented as having progressed along a hierarchy from former slaves to sharecroppers (see Charleston Area Convention and Tourist Bureau website advertisement of a 2008 museum exhibit “From Slave to Sharecropper”). The sharecropper category refers to a farmer who is given credit for seeds, tools, food, housing, and access to land, with part of the harvest going to repay the landowner. This description typically implies that the sharecropper is not a landowner. Such a description fails to recognize the land-ownership status and distinctions in employment patterns of many descendants. For example, this excerpt from a tourist website for the city of Charleston, describing Boone Hall Plantation, still refers to descendants as sharecroppers: “The plantation [Boone Hall] includes a large post-civil-war farmhouse, a number of original slave cabins (which were occupied by sharecroppers well into the twentieth century), several flowering gardens, …” (Charleston Private Equity LLC website n.d.).

Indiscriminate use of the term sharecropper masks the dynamic ways in which descendants of enslaved Africans interpreted their lives and the wide range of skilled laborer roles that they assumed in plantation communities. By focusing on a single category of labor, the use of sharecropping, as universally representative of the scope of work that enslaved Africans and their descendants engaged in, does not acknowledge the breadth of labor practices in antebellum and postbellum plantations. Such limited characterizations reveal how fixed notions of identity within an antebellum plantation narrative create and reproduce narrow representations of enslaved Africans and their descendants, as well as limited interpretive options for public presentations of national history.

The significance of categorization and categorical systems to this discussion is that the value attached to them as forms of knowledge about the past has significant implications in the present (Valentine 2007).

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