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.8Not only did urbanization allow former bondpeople to reconstruct fami-lies shattered by decades of enslavement and forced separation, it also gaveyoung African Americans far greater access to potential marriage partners.Contrary to popular myth, masters did not routinely select partners for theirslaves, and the small holdings typical of northern farm slavery limited theromantic options available to rural bondpeople.Jack Burghardt was surelyattracted to the strong-willed Freeman; regardless, he had few options in thetiny black community of western Massachusetts.Boston, New York, andPhiladelphia were an altogether different matter.Yet even in large urbanareas, the process of building a family and starting a household was rarelyeasy.The 1790 census revealed that in Boston, where slavery had been deadfor nearly a decade, one in three blacks resided with whites, and many werethe sole African American within the home.Young black men, in particu-lar, often stayed with one another in large, extended households until theywere able to set up their own households.When at last financially solvent,northern African Americans wasted little time in starting families.The samecensus demonstrated that 88 percent of the black households in Philadelphiathat contained children below the age of fourteen were headed by both anadult male and female.9If anything, kinship networks among freed people were even more impor-tant in the Chesapeake, where freedom did not accompany one s twenty-eighth174 | death or libertybirthday.Instead, the handful of blacks who gained their liberty after theprivate manumission act of 1783 frequently labored for years to earn enoughto purchase a spouse or child.Slaves with no hopes of freedom often turnedto already liberated family members to aid in escapes.When Sam vanishedfrom the Maryland countryside, his master assumed he had fled to Baltimore,where he had  several relations (manumitted Blacks), who will conceal andassist him to make his escape. Young husbands with access to the Northwere the most likely to risk fl ight.Tom Turner, a freed waterman whoseknowledge of the Chesapeake s rivers increased his odds of success, convincedhis enslaved wife, Bet, to leave with him.In opposing plans for gradualemancipation, Jefferson feared that staggered liberation might create prob-lems of racial control in Virginia.Faced with numerous stories such as thoseof Sam and Bet, Virginia slaveholders petitioned the assembly to restrain themovement of freed blacks, since the  great number of relations and acquain-tances they still have among us motivated men like Turner to liberate theirfamilies.The fact that no sooner was Tom Turner freed than he returned tofree Bet, of course, suggests the seriousness with which they regarded theirmarriage, even if the state did not.10Upon reaching Baltimore safely, former slaves such as Sam immediatelydid what Mum Bett had done several years before: they adopted a surname.Although slaves had occasionally taken a family or occupational name for useamong themselves, few masters wished to bestow upon their human propertythe sense of dignity a surname implied.Particularly in the kinship-consciousSouth, family connections conferred rank and social value, and so slaves weredenied both.Kinship among slaves had no standing in the law.The adop-tion of a surname, therefore, represented a defiant act of personal liberation.For black fathers, it served as a public announcement of patrilineal authorityin a country that had long defi ned the status of black children by the legalcondition of the mother.For slaves with comical names, such as GustavusVassa, later known as Olaudah Equiano, the adoption of a new name (or inEquiano s case, perhaps, the reclaiming of his birth name) reversed the pro-cess of enslavement.11In the urban North, former slaves hurriedly dropped their classical andeven biblical forenames in favor of English names or Anglicized versions ofAfrican names.Cudjo was changed to Joe, and Kwaku or Quok to Jack.Men more than women transformed diminutive nicknames, so Billy becameWilliam rather than Will.When adopting surnames, a few northern freed-people retained the family names of their masters, but most wished to obliter-ate any connection to the past.The Dutch, for example, had been significantslaveholders in New York and New Jersey, but the freedman calling himselfmum bett takes a name | 175Mingo Roosevelt was rare in adopting a Dutch surname.Far more typicalwere former slaves such as Bett, who selected names in celebration of theirnew status.Robert Freedom, Landon Freeland, and Robin Justice all chosesurnames in commemoration of their societal rise in rank, as did the runawayTom Toogood.Still others, as had European serfs hundreds of years before,accepted occupational names, some of which had perhaps been previouslyused within the black community.Jim the drayman became James Carter,Henry Mason was a bricklayer, Charles Green was a talented gardener, andthe ambitious clergyman Jake assumed the name of Jacob Bishop.12Naming patterns took a slightly different course in the rural South, wherethe larger number of African Americans and the cultural isolation of theslave quarters allowed for the greater preservation of West African customs.Few freedpeople adopted the name of their former masters; Denmark Veseywas a notable exception, and the aspiring carpenter surely did so for busi-ness reasons.One could also find celebratory surnames [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]