I rarely read other authors’ acknowledgments because they make me cry. They not only lay bare the extraordinary networks of family, friends, and peers who make books possible; they also reveal the profound love that helps sustain each author on his or her journey to completion. That’s what gets me every time. Now that I am writing my own, I find it to be a momentous task, one that is far more difficult to complete than I ever imagined.
I am a statistic in almost every way, and no one, including myself, could have guessed that I would become a professor of history or write a book. My grandparents were North Carolina sharecroppers who never attended high school. I am the daughter of a single mother who finished high school while she was pregnant with my sister. I was raised in Newark, New Jersey, which, until recently, claimed the highest homicide rate in the state. I was a teenage mother. I received welfare benefits and food stamps and was even evicted from my apartment because I could not pay my rent. And despite, or perhaps because of, this past, I am here. Many people guided me along the way.
My mother was the first historian I ever knew. When I was a teenager, we drank coffee and tea while she told me stories of her childhood as a sharecropper’s daughter. She wrote dates and locations on the backs of every historical object we kept in our apartment, and she recounted the events that made each object worth keeping. She taught me the importance of remembering and of truths that should never be forgotten. She was like a magician to me because she always seemed to know how to make the apparently impossible possible. Even more than this, she never placed constraints on what I could become, and she never doubted that I could be all that I am today. Her boundless love has sustained me through the darkest and brightest times. She continues to be my biggest and most enthusiastic fan, and for that I owe her my greatest debt.
At nineteen, I met one of the most extraordinary human beings to walk the earth, my husband, Tyshon. He has been the glue that has held me together all these years. We have been dirt-poor together, barely making it together, and semi-comfortable together. He’s been an exceptional father to our son, Ramess. He’s also been my friend, my therapist, my at-home colleague, my editor, and a bit of my agent, too. More vitally, he has always respected me and treated me as his equal. He is a rare bird indeed, and I’m so fortunate to have him in my life.
I have to thank my sister Stacy for supporting me through a tough phase of my life and opening her home to me while I was writing the final chapters of my dissertation.
I would not be a historian today if it were not for Deborah Gray White and Kim Butler. As an undergraduate psychology major, I was convinced that I’d become a psychologist. But the course of my life changed when I met Deborah and Kim. In word and deed, Deborah personified the historian I hoped to become. She was candid about her humble beginnings, and she talked about the discrimination she’d experienced over the course of her career. As my intellectual mother, she never dismissed my hopes or my ideas. She introduced me to a world I had never known as a young girl living in Newark. She was gracious enough to allow me to bring my infant son to class when I was an undergraduate, and as my mentor and dissertation chair, she continued to support me in ways that could never be reciprocated.
Kim Butler, whose passion for history made it exciting for me, was the first professor to talk to me about graduate school, something I had never considered. It was her encouragement that ultimately led to my pursuit of a doctoral degree. For all of this, I owe Deborah and Kim my deep gratitude.
No amount of thanks could possibly convey my appreciation for the support that Daina Ramey Berry, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Cornelia Dayton Hughes, Leslie Schwalm, and Kathryn Kish Sklar have given to me. They have been gracious and extraordinarily generous with their time and their wisdom as I completed this project. I have grown immensely because of them.
Thavolia Glymph and Jennifer Morgan, as well as the late Stephanie M. H. Camp and the late Judith Kelleher Shafer, whose work proved to be, and continues to be, fundamental to my training and intellectual development as a scholar of slavery, read my work in progress and offered invaluable feedback. Linda Kerber and Emily West provided me with my first opportunities to publish my work. I am forever grateful to them for recognizing the importance and value of my research.
I extend special thanks to my friend Alix Genter, whose questions during Nancy Hewitt’s women’s and gender history research seminar served as the catalyst for the research that began as my dissertation and forms the basis of this book. When other graduate students made me feel invisible, she made it clear that she saw me. Her acknowledgment of my presence, her support, and her conversation made all the difference during particularly isolating times.
Leigh-Anne Francis became my dear friend and intellectual big sister. I remember the first time I met her. When she came into the room her presence was immediately felt. She did not shrink in the ways that I initially did. She recognized my potential, taught me about the importance of self-care, and encouraged me to take a seat at the proverbial table. She always treated me with kindness and honored my humanity. I could never repay her in kind.
Professors in the Rutgers-Newark Federated History Department, especially Beryl Satter, Susan Carruthers, Karen Caplan, James Goodman, Eva Giloi, and Stephen Pemberton were critical to my training, and they helped me become the historian I am today. They all pushed me out of my intellectual comfort zone. They were tough but always supportive. A heartfelt thanks to them. Christina Strasburger always brightened my day with her kindness and her smiles. I owe them all, and the Rutgers-Newark History Department, a great debt.
From the moment I met her, Nancy Hewitt exuded an indescribable kind of light. From the time I was completing my doctoral work, she has offered me nothing but support, smiles, and encouragement. Thank you for sharing your light with me, Nancy. Michael Adas, Mia Bay, Ruth Feldstein, Seth Koven, James Livingston, Donna Murch, and Camilla Townsend taught me to think about history in nuanced ways and helped me to further polish and refine my skills as a historian both in and out of their classrooms.
My Berkeley colleagues have supported me in innumerable ways since my arrival in fall 2014. I am especially indebted to Rebecca McLennan, Thomas Laqueur, Waldo Martin, David Henkin, Dylan Penningroth, Margaret Chowning, Tabitha Konogo, Mark Peterson, Robin Einhorn, Mark Brilliant, and Victoria Frede, who read multiple drafts of this book and helped me work through most of the kinks. The advice, support, and friendship of my colleagues Sandra Eder, Caitlin Rosenthal, and Elena Schneider have made my time at Berkeley enjoyable. A warm thanks must go to Marianne Bartholomew-Couts, Janet Flores, and Jan Haase, who helped me maximize my research funds and figure out how to afford to do the research while paying off a six-figure student debt and caring for my family.
Edward Baptist, Rick Bell, Steven Deyle, Walter Johnson, Adam Rothman, and many peers have read and offered helpful feedback about this book. Yvonne Pitts proposed the term “double mastery” in her commentary about my conference paper “‘Her Title to Said Negroes Is Perfect & Complete’: Slavery, Marriage, and Women’s Challenges to Coverture in the Nineteenth-Century South,” which was presented during the American Society for Legal History’s 2015 Annual Meeting. I thank them all for their generative comments and feedback.
Heartfelt thanks must be extended to the undergraduate students who enrolled in my classes and assisted me with my research via Berkeley’s Undergraduate Research Apprenticeship Program over the years. They routinely posed provocative questions about women and slavery for which I had no answer, and their questions compelled me to search for answers, searches that helped shape the content that appears in this book.
The University of Iowa School of Letters and Sciences, the Newcomb College Institute of Tulane University (with warm thanks to Sally Kenney and Laura Wolford), the Institute of International Studies, and the Board of Regents at the University of California, Berkeley, offered generous funding that helped support this project.
Thank you to archivists on staff who meticulously care for the invaluable special collections housed in the New Orleans Public Library, the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans, the Historical New Orleans Collection, and the New Orleans Historical Notarial Archives. I especially thank Jennifer Dorner, the former history librarian at Berkeley, who fought to acquire access to archival collections that proved vital to my research for this book.
And last, but certainly not least, I send my deepest thanks to my editors, William Frucht, Karen Olson, Susan Laity, and Cecelia Cancellaro. I extend special thanks to Laura Duvalis and Chuck Grench, who worked with me on earlier versions of this project.
Portions of chapter 1 first appeared as “Mistresses in the Making,” in Women’s America: Refocusing the Past, 8th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Linda Kerber, Jane Sherron De Hart, Cornelia Hughes Dayton, and Judy Wu served as editors, and the content is reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press, https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/womens-america-9780199349340?cc=us&lang=en&. An abbreviated version of Chapter 5 appeared as “‘[S]he could . . . spare one ample breast for the profit of her owner’: White Mothers and Enslaved Wet Nurses’ Invisible Labor in American Slave Markets,” in Slavery & Abolition 38, no. 2 (April 2017), and is republished by permission of Taylor and Francis Ltd.