North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Black and White: Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South by Ted OwnbyReview by: Claudine L. FerrellThe North Carolina Historical Review, Vol. 71, No. 3 (JULY 1994), p. 370Published by: North Carolina Office of Archives and HistoryStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23521703 .

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370 Book Reviews

Black and White: Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South. Edited by Ted Ownby. (Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Acknowledgments, introduction, illustrations, notes,

contributors, index. Pp. xix, 241. $17.95, paper.)

The ten challenging and thought-provoking essays and commentaries in Black and

White: Cultural Interaction in the Antebellum South were originally presented at the

University of Mississippi. They are a sharp reminder why there will always be a reason to study slavery and why there will always be debate about that institution's impact on this country. Playing off of T. H. Breen's theory of "cultural conversations" between antebellum slaves and southern whites, the essayists successfully suggest a variety of theories and approaches—concentrating on everything from ethics (Mechal Sobel) to slave quarters (John Michael Vlach)—as they "address issues of both power and

meaning" and "the degree to which interaction and interchange were possible between

dominant and dominated groups." Black and White begins with a useful introduction by Ted Ownby of the University

of Mississippi and a brisk opening essay by South Carolina's Charles Joyner. Continuing his argument that "the central theme of southern history has been racial integration," Joyner sets the tone for the collection by asserting that "the mixing of cultural traditions in the South is more responsible than any other single factor for the extraordinary richness of southern culture," adding that the mixing of cultures has meant "a single southern culture."

Essays on religion (Sylvia R. Frey and Robert L. Hall), ethics (Sobel and Elliott J. Gorn), slave quarters (Vlach and Brenda Stevenson), music (Bill C. Malone and Leslie Howard Owens), and work (Lawrence McDonnell) are intriguing, even if occasionally flawed in their arguments and editing. They emphasize the compelling nuances in volved in interpreting such a difficult topic as culture, and they prove that understand

ing slavery, the South, and American culture is more complex than recounting slave folktales and field songs or calculating the number of slaves who hired out their labor. Bill Malone, for example, makes it vividly clear that studying southern music is a difficult task when one relies on evidence that often postdates the period under study. McDonnell's "Work, Culture, and Society in the Slave South, 1790-1861" argues that

slavery and white-black interaction will never be understood if historians continue to

shortchange labor and the "hard-fought process of individualization, deskilling, and

proletarianization which drew blacks and whites together in patterns astonishing and

frightening to southern slaveholders." As Owens emphasizes in his closing commentary, such aspects of culture as folk songs

and stories provide insights if one goes beyond their existence "to the roles they played in the lives of the people." This view, seen throughout the essays and supported by valuable content endnotes, makes Black and White a compelling book for anyone ready to see history as a maze of complex questions and answers.

Mary Washington College

Claudine L. Ferrell

THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL REVIEW

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