What Sorrows Labour in My Parent’s Breast?: A History of the Enslaved Black Family by Brenda E. Stevenson (review)

Reviewed by: What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast?: A History of the Enslaved Black Family by Brenda E. Stevenson Samuel Watts (bio) What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast?: A History of the Enslaved Black Family. By Brenda E. Stevenson. (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2023. Pp. 440. Cloth, $45.00.) When Henry Bibb escaped to the North in 1842, and then on to Canada, he used his newfound freedom to great effect, learning to read and write before becoming an abolitionist writer, publisher, and lecturer himself, dedicated to exposing the horrors of slavery through accounts of his experiences as a slave in the South. Bibb was assisted in these endeavors by Mary E. Bibb (née Miles), his wife, an antislavery activist, writer, and educator, the daughter of free Black Quakers from Rhode Island. Yet, as Bibb details in his slave narrative, when he reached freedom, he had already been married for nine years—to Malinda Bibb, the mother of his daughter, Mary Frances. Henry's decision to leave his family was not taken lightly, and he had previously attempted to take his wife and child with him, but they were recaptured, sold, and separated—with Malinda and Mary Frances being sold to a man who claimed Malinda as his concubine (the fate of Mary Frances is unknown). Brenda E. Stevenson's What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast? documents the centrality of the Black family to the experience of slavery and how Black kinship structures were routinely maintained, severed, and re-created in extreme and highly traumatic circumstances. In addition to reexamining well-known slave narratives, like those of Henry Bibb, Olaudah Equiano, and Phillis Wheatley, Stevenson draws on a wide array of Works Progress Administration interviews, published accounts, and historiographical sources to create a historical portrait of the Black family that is wide in scope, rich in detail, remarkably concise, and compelling from beginning to end. Stevenson goes far beyond a simple consolidation of these accounts, with her analysis exploring the complexity of enslaved family experiences across different temporal, geographic, economic, and political contexts. In the case of Bibb and his first wife, Malinda, Stevenson's analysis underscores the extremity of plantation violence and the brutality of the antebellum domestic slave trade, as well as the moral dilemma faced by enslaved people seeking freedom and the consequences—often gendered— for those left behind. "We must remember," notes Stevenson, "that it was Malinda, after all, who lessened her chances for gaining freedom. . . . She must have deeply regretted, perhaps even fiercely resented, the marriage, [End Page 380] given Henry's inability to keep his promise to her, and undoubtedly her family, that he would help her and their children to gain liberation" (192). While Henry Bibb abandoned plans to rescue Malinda once he learned she was living in what he regarded as a "state of adultery" (191), it was Malinda who was left to care for their child, who was not able to tell her own story, and who was forced into a life of sexual slavery; a life from which, Stevenson notes, she likely could not protect her daughter. While she provides an invaluable resource for students and historians of the antebellum South, one of Stevenson's principal contributions is to broaden the historical perspective and highlight the importance of Black kinship networks from bondage in West and Central Africa, through the experience of the Middle Passage, and into the colonies of the British, Dutch, French, and Spanish empires. Enslaved kinship in this era was shaped, Stevenson demonstrates, not only by the different political and economic contexts of each of these colonial empires, but also by the diversity of sociocultural traditions practiced by the nations from which enslaved people were violently wrested. The cultural groups transported, sold, and enslaved in North America (Wolof, Tembe, Akan, Igbo, Kongo, and Yoruba are just some of the groups discussed) all practiced different kinship traditions, with these traditions necessarily evolving over the period of the Atlantic slave trade. The breadth and detail of Stevenson's analysis is impressive, as is the clarity of her prose, carefully shaped and paced to provide a compelling overview of the multitude of factors...