Mark Auslander has an editorial in tomorrow's Atlanta Journal Constitution on questions inspired by The Help: "Did African-American women domestic workers, as the film and novel imply, truly love their young white charges? Or were they putting on skilled performances for the sake of economic survival?" He returns to the subject of his imminently forthcoming book, The Accidental Slaveowner, to address the historical roots of those questions.
This raises a different set of questions for me, because I study proslavery thought: how often did slaveonwers have genuine affection for their enslaved human property? And what were the boundaries of that affection, to the extent it existed. There's a huge literature on this -- some of it, like Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello and Bernie Jones' Fathers of Conscience, deals with people who were owned and were family members; sometimes those owners freed their family members -- or attempted to do so.
But much more common were cases where enslaved people were brutalized by their owners. It's easy to forget that amidst the images of moonlight and magnolia and the critique of the free labor system so common in pre-war southern literature that charged, in essence, free workers had worse living conditions than slaves.
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