The time has come the walrus said to talk of many things.
I’ve already talked about the introduction and the importance of your cover
choices. Now it’s time to talk about the chapters. Some chapters will be a
stately walk through your archival evidence to back up your historiographical
claims. Unexciting but solid, establishing your scholarly credibility. You
should not have too many of these or else the monograph will read too much like
a dissertation defense and lack originality. Some chapters will flow
beautifully and be a pleasure to write. Others will be hell to write and you
will hate them. You will struggle with them and leave them till the end—like
folding the odd socks last that accumulated after doing a week’s worth of laundry.
The latter was referred to in my household for at least three years as That
Damn Chapter.
As you review everything you’ve written that you’ve stored
dutifully in a folder in your laptop—you scan the evidence and the arguments that
inexorably lead to the writing of The Book. Great! But when you dig deeper into
that file folder, you’ll find extraneous things. What about the 8 page double
spaced paper that you wrote (for some panel?) at some annual conference? There
were kernels of wisdom in there. What about the edited volume that you contributed
an abstract to that fell through? Remember you are keeping to your goal of 600
words per day. The beautiful thing about repurposing what you wrote before is
that those words count towards your daily goal! You need to look at your
research question (pinned prominently on the wall above your computer) to see
whether this conference paper/abstract and its argument and its evidence fit
into the book. If not—out with it. As an archive rat, I know how hard it is to
let go of evidence that is painstakingly gathered, annotated, transcribed. My research question written in bold capital
letters was: how did intimacy order
slavery and how did slavery order intimacy? If I had evidence that did not
speak to that question—I sucked it up and chucked it. TBH: I made another
folder and dumped it in there under TBD. We are historians after all—for a
beautiful rumination on our attachment to archival detritus, read Carolyn
Steedman’s Dust.
My own path to the favorite chapter was a fortuitous
casualty of the edited volume that fell through. I was invited to contribute a piece
to a collection about social mobility among nonelite, multiracial families in
Latin America. Two wonderful Brazilian historians of the family and of slavery—Elizabeth Kuznesof and Mariana Dantas extended the invitation. I vaguely promised
something and then panicked when months later the first stage materialized,
demanding production. Since so much time had lapsed between the initial
invitation stage (that led to acceptance based on delirium rather than a firm
grasp on reality) and the no-go, you might wonder why look at the abstract at
all. It so happens that the sources I planned to use for the collection had a
particular focus on children. I had assiduously been collecting baptismal
records from all five of Lima’s parishes for years. By the time I sat down to
write, I had baptismal records for the entire seventeenth century, which had
miraculously survived. When I looked at the entries, it became clear that there
were a number of what I call mixed status families. It is a term more familiar
with immigration scholars than historians, but what I mean by it is to
designate families in which some of the members were free and some were
enslaved.
Baptismal records state the name of the child, the presence
of godparents, previous in extremis baptisms, as well as the name, status, and
owner of the mother. If the father is known or willing to acknowledge
paternity, the father is listed as well. The baptismal record, though
formulaic, is literally a tiny social history of the child and the networks
into which she is embedded. Many diaspora scholars and family historians have
skillfully mined these records, as well as colonial historians writing about
race, illegitimacy and social mobility. But the baptismal record did not give
me everything I needed to know about the arc of the child’s life. I noticed
that many entries freed the child, but kept the mother enslaved. Baptismal
manumission was a way to keep the services of the mother, with the prospect of
better conditions for the child. However, I argued that baptismal manumission
was akin to constructive re-enslavement. Questions irrepressibly spring to my mind as I leafed through these documents: what was it like to watch your child raised by
your owner? What was the impact of mixed status on the relationships between
mother and child? Many of the owners “freeing” slave children were religious
and childless women whose stated intention was to have someone to care for them
in their old age. European women freeing children at the font appropriated the reproductive labor of their
slaves even as they couched their intentions within the rhetoric of love,
family, and child welfare.
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| Baptismal font, Iglesia del Salvador |
Whether I convince readers is a question that only they can
answer. But writing this chapter for me brought together so many arguments,
themes and points as I moved through the life-stages of slavery. I think we
should be open to these kinds of invitations to contribute to collections that
many not be totally on point with our writing at the time, but can push us to
look at our evidence in new and generative ways.
Next up: the Chapter from hell!
