This remarkably concise history of family among the enslaved explores diverse family practices from the 17th century through Reconstruction. Its title comes from a Phillis Wheatley poem expressing the trauma of family formations among enslaved persons. Captors set arduous conditions of compulsory labor, torture, sexual violence, and forcible relocation as ongoing structural challenges to family formation and maintenance. This tension between the desires of enslaved persons to create family and the power of captors to exploit and destroy it shapes the book's six splendidly written chapters. Stevenson exquisitely deploys the biographies of specific enslaved persons to illustrate her deeply researched thesis about family diversity and resilience, reflecting differing cultural legacies imported from the African continent to the differing colonial and antebellum societies in the US. These range from the well-known sagas of Wheatley and Elizabeth Keckley to less familiar stories such as that of Chloe Spear. Splendidly contextualizing her argument within the evolving historiography and the persistent stereotype of the Black family as defective and dysfunctional, Stevenson demonstrates not only the centrality of family in the African American experience but also the resilience and resistance of African American actors across time. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Brenda E. Stevenson’s What Sorrows Labour in My Parents’ Breast provides a thorough and comprehensive analysis of African and enslaved African American family life from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. The prodigious documentation fully supports her conclusion that despite the violence and brutality of enslavement, Black families were the often-unacknowledged source of happiness, personal identity, spiritual well-being, and a sense of self-worth and purpose. Stevenson elegantly describes the social and economic circumstances that produced the distinctive African-centered cultural beliefs and practices that sustained enslaved African American families. We gain new understandings of family formations, kinship relations, labor conditions, courtship and marriage rituals, parenthood, communal activities, and the terrifying impact of the domestic slave trade on the families of the enslaved. The sale of family members and unrestrained brutality prompted innumerable acts of resistance and revolt. Sweeping in scope, powerfully written, and overflowing in dramatic insight, What Sorrows Labour in My Parents’ Breast is a major contribution to U. S. Family Studies and African American social and cultural history.

V. P. Franklin, author of Black Self-Determination: A Cultural History of African American Resistance and The Young Crusaders: The Untold Story of the Children and Teenagers Who Galvanized the Civil Rights Movement

While revisiting the debates about the nature of the black family in slavery and freedom, Professor Stevenson deftly shows how kinship patterns born in Africa, and reshaped by the enslaved, became the foundation of African American survival and culture. What Sorrows Labour in My Parents’ Breast? shows how African Americans lived family; how it structured religion, resistance, recreation, sex, separation and death. It is an essential read for those seeking to understand African American history and identity.

Deborah Gray White, Rutgers University, Board of Governers Distinguished Professors of History

Written by one of the most distinguished scholars of African American history, What Sorrows Labor in My Parent’s Breast offers a definitive portrait of enslaved Black family life across North America from the early colonial period to post-Civil War emancipation. This remarkable book documents the wide-ranging struggles of captive Africans and their descendants to claim kinship amidst a system of chattel slavery that denied Black families access to both legal protections and privacy in their most intimate relations. Brenda Stevenson’s erudite exploration of a vast array of sources – legal records, archaeological evidence, visual sources, and the testimony of enslaved people -- conveys the diversity, complexity, and persistence of Black family forms across centuries of bondage under multiple colonial systems. Accessible and recommended to scholars and general readers alike, this book powerfully refutes toxic historical myths about Black families in US history. Story by story, readers instead come to understand how kinship ties, both inherited and chosen, have proved essential to all dimensions of Black life and survival.

Sharla M. Fett, professor of History, Occidental College