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 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...