Frances Smith Foster - 'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part. Love and Marriage in African America [2010][A]

Book Description
Publication Date: January 12, 2010
Conventional wisdom tells us that marriage was illegal for African Americans during the antebellum era, and that if people married at all, their vows were tenuous ones: "until death or distance do us part." It is an impression that imbues beliefs about black families to this day. But it's a perception primarily based on documents produced by abolitionists, the state, or other partisans. It doesn't tell the whole story.

Drawing on a trove of less well-known sources including family histories, folk stories, memoirs, sermons, and especially the fascinating writings from the Afro-Protestant Press,'Til Death or Distance Do Us Part offers a radically different perspective on antebellum love and family life.

Frances Smith Foster applies the knowledge she's developed over a lifetime of reading and thinking. Advocating both the potency of skepticism and the importance of story-telling, her book shows the way toward a more genuine, more affirmative understanding of African American romance, both then and now.

Editorial Review
From Publishers Weekly
Faced with a plethora of stories about promiscuous coupling and fatherless families, instability, and group dysfunction, Foster (Written by Herself) illuminates the African-American historical experience of love and marriage through the stories that antebellum African Americans told among themselves. She relies particularly on the records of the 18th century Free African Union Societies of Newport, R.I., and Philadelphia and 19th-century slave narratives along with contemporaneous novels and poems. The most groundbreaking content stems from the Afro-Protestant press periodicals, which are treasure troves of ideas, experiences, and ideals. She has more on her mind than emending the historical record; after leaving the antebellum period, where she amply demonstrates that African-American marriage was frequent, that family ties were strong, she embarks on digressive journeys. Her meditations—on negative contemporary narratives, the work of various social scientists (friendly fire in our battle to be a free people in a free country), her daughter's wedding, and the Defense of Marriage Act—somewhat dilute the richness of her primary theme. Still, readers will be freshly informed by the historical and, perhaps, engaged by the tangential. (Jan.)

Reviews
"This is a challenging and important text. After deconstructing our national myths about marriage and our specific assumptions about African American marriage, Foster masterfully reconstructs the reality of marriage for enslaved black people. Rather than finding a fragile institution of transient attachments, she uncovers a legacy of love, struggle, and commitment. By choosing whom to love, how to love, and what to sacrifice, black Americans carved out space for their human selves. Their marriages contributed to decades of resistance against the dehumanizing effects of slavery. Although there is not a hint of sentimentalism, this book is truly an inspiring love story."--Melissa Harris-Lacewell, author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought

"Foster demolishes stereotypes about the history of love, sexuality, and marriage among antebellum African Americans and issues a passionate argument for why contemporary Americans need to understand the complexity, variety, and richness of the intimate relationships forged by enslaved and free African American women and men in the past."-Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage

"No stranger to writing about African slaves and Blacks in the antebellum period, Foster has done an excellent job discussing a significant ritualized institution that very often gets lost in the history of Africans in America -- marriage."--Shannon Butler-Mokoro, Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

About the Author
Frances Smith Foster is Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies (Emeritus) at Emory University. Her previous books include Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 (Indiana UP, 1993), Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Ante-Bellum Slave Narrative (Greenwood, 1979), and several edited collections. Her VSI to African American Literature is forthcoming.