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Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)

Amazon.com Price:  $36.00 (as of 06/05/2019 06:54 PST- Details)

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Description

In the back of the “Big Houses” of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves’ environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves’ own perspective.

The plantation landscape was once chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their very own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the crucial more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of a distinctive African American culture within the South.

Vlach has chosen more than 200 photographs and drawings from the Historic American Buildings Survey–an archive that has been mined again and again for its images of the planters’ residences but rarely for the ones of slave dwellings. In a dramatic photographic tour, Vlach leads readers through kitchens, smokehouses, dairies, barns and stables, and overseers’ houses, after all reaching the slave quarters. To rouse a firsthand sense of what it was once like to live and work in these spaces, he includes excerpts from the moving testimonies of former slaves drawn from the Federal Writers’ Project collections.

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