Mississippi Library Association

Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South

Kaye, Anthony E. Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South.
Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
365 pp. $22.95 (paperback)

This fine first monograph by Anthony E. Kaye describes a little known facet of slave life – that slaves transformed plantation life into slave neighborhoods with unique slave cultures. These neighborhoods allowed slaves to date, practice religion, marry (albeit marriages not recognized by law), work for pay outside their plantation, and have a sense of community.

The focus of this book is Mississippi – in the regions of both Vicksburg and Natchez. The time period spans from the antebellum period through the early days of Reconstruction. The author touts his book as the first such source to use vast testimony by ex-slaves and pensions files of former soldiers in the Union Army.

Other sources used by the author include Works Progress Administration records, plantation journals, newspapers, county court cases, travelers’ diaries, and the records of the Southern Claims Commission.

One weakness of the book is that Kaye – an assistant professor of American history at Pennsylvania State University – doesn’t provide detailed evidence that slave neighborhoods existed in all of the southern slave states; although, Kaye does provide cursory evidence that slave neighborhoods did exist in North Carolina and Virginia.

The fact that Kaye makes the case about slaves and neighborhoods in Mississippi is his book’s greatest strength. Until now, this story had not been told. Kaye’s book appears to be a truly unique contribution to the body of literature about this chapter of history – and hopefully, Kaye’s subject matter will be re-examined in future scholarly endeavors.

This book is recommended for academic and public libraries.

Peter R. Dean
Information Services Librarian
University of Southern Mississippi-Gulf Coast

Entry Filed under: Book Reviews
Posted on: September 29th, 2009