It's About Time; Eugene Genovese

America's history is constantly the subject of re-evaluation and reinterpretation. To a large degree historians try to understand our past in order that we might better understand our present and move into our future. It's about time is interested in our past and our future as well as the process of change. And with that in mind we welcome Eugene D. Genevasek and historian who studies slavery. He has just published a book called Roll Jordan Roll which presents a complex study of the culture of the Old South of slavery days. Eugene was so much in American history why did you choose slavery as the feel that you concentrate on? Well actually I started out not so much studying slavery itself as

the Old South. And if you ask me why did that it's I think a combination of two things one for tourists. I was an undergraduate student working with a professor who led me into it and it became fascinating. But secondly because it did give me an opportunity to study something unusual in American society namely a region where a particular ruling class arose and fell within time limits. And that meant an opportunity to see how some people could rule others what it meant to their attitude toward the law, toward the culture, toward dependent classes. It became a kind of a laboratory for me and I stayed with it. Do you study black people or white people or is that an important thing to talk about?

You can't study white soil blacks in a society such as that of the Old South and isolation. The most striking thing about that world was that blacks and whites lived together intimately. And anyone who tries to study southern whites without studying southern blacks is going to fail and the reverse is true. I started out actually studying the plant of class and although I've done some essays on the slaves this is my first book on the slaves. And what led me into a long and detailed study of the slaves was that at a certain point I realized I couldn't understand the masters unless I studied them. Well you did write a book about the plant or class did you not? Yes, I've done a number of things about the plant, the class and the social system as a whole. And as I say at a certain point it just became clear I couldn't go any further with those studies unless I took a lot of time to study the culture of the slaves and how that culture influenced the masters both antagonistically and in harmony.

When I'm talking to you it's important to talk about classes. It does not that influence a lot of your study. Well yes my own point of view toward history is Marxist and what that means specifically is a sense that the driving force and historical change is to be found in the way in which social classes rule each other and face each other. That was what so fascinated me about the south as a class system from the beginning. A lot of people use a shorthand for Marxist economic determinism. Is that what you're talking about? I know that's a familiar misunderstanding and we could spend a lot of time with it but Marx was not an economic determinist though he sometimes slid into it and there are some people who are Marxists who put it this way. Marxist thought I think was very complex

and it can be developed in different directions. That's one direction it could be developed but I think most Marxist historians today certainly those are respect as the really good ones a far removed from economic determinism. I suspect a lot of us in our high school and junior high school books of history read principally about King Cotton and did that would be economic or certainly not Marxist interpretation. How do you relate all of the social system which seems to be the thing you're much more interested in to that particular kind of an economic system? Well first of all the south was much more than cotton. Large portions of it were given over to sugar cultivation and rice cultivation hemp tobacco even wheat. You can't understand the social relations by focusing primarily on the crop although it certainly played a role because the system was basically a plantation system and cotton was the main plantation crop but in the end I think the decisive thing was the plantation

as a small world into itself and the way in which it threw whites and blacks together in a very unequal relationship and an oppressive relationship but still an organic one. Most of us think of plantations as a place that is really a small society that has maybe 20,000 people whatever big numbers is that true? Not in the United States what we call plantations in the United States by convention, Atlantic Bellum definition where units of 20 slaves are more. That's very small. By Caribbean or Brazilian standards they would qualify as farms. Typical slave plantation in the Caribbean or Brazil would have somewhere between 150 and 200 slaves. Typical plantation in the United States 2030. Did that affect the relationships of the people within that small? Oh surely. For one thing it meant that well I think it was a contributing factor in most southern slaveholders being resident masters, not absentees as in the Caribbean.

And that makes a difference. Made a big difference because it meant that the white family for a better or for worse was living among its black people and interacting with them on a day-to-day basis. Now on the black side it meant a smaller unit again with a much more intimate life among themselves on the one side and in relation to the whites on the other. It was therefore a highly charged setting in that on the one hand there was great intimacy and you know apologist for the regime like to talk about how much love and affection it was. Incidentally it's a mistake to write that off it just propaganda. There was a great deal of it. The problem was that it was also a relationship which was highly oppressive in some respects at its worst vicious. But mainly if you put aside the more extreme it was a relationship in which no matter how much intimacy and even affection there may have been it was violence charged. There was some people with power over other people in a very close day-to-day world with

all the frustrations that human beings suffer and there were always other people namely black people around to take those frustrations out on and they did. So that it's almost if you view it as a very unhappy family. And I don't say that to romanticize that relationship. Unhappy families can have all kinds of legitimate affection at work and yet they can be tremendous brutality. As you use the word family does that not relate to the term of paternalism which is often applied to the South? Well yes and in my book I talk a good deal about paternalism which I think has to be taken very seriously as the reigning ethos. What misleads some people I think is the notion that somehow paternalism means kindness, sweetness and light, moonlight and magnolias. What it implies is that the whites, the master class regarded

as slaves as being people in their charge to whom they had certain responsibilities, responsibility to feed them, to clothe them, to even provide them with a certain amount of living space. At the same time they expected not only productive labor. They also expected absolute loyalty and deference so that to me paternalism by its very nature is a violence provoking relationship and not at all an idyllic one. Again in that ten pages that the history books would have given to slavery if that one of the things that certainly was talked about would be slave revolts. Is that a factor in American slavery? How big, how important what difference did that make? You keep talking about the violence but whether the kind of slave revolts that you find other places? Well first there were relatively few slave revolts in the United States and perhaps even more to the point that were very small.

The biggest slave revolts on record took place in Louisiana in 1811 and if we're generous we may be able to find as many 400 rebels. Nat Turner, the most famous of our slave rebels led a group of 70 or so. Now if you look at the black slaves of Jamaica they went up an insurrection of the thousands periodically in Sandalman what is now Haiti in tens of thousands and conquered the country in Brazil a similar story. Now you know some historians have looked at this and said in effect there's something wrong with the slaves in the United States you know they were docile. Well they weren't docile. I think it could be shown and I hope to show in a book I'm working on now we finish some. That in fact the real problems were that unlike the slaves elsewhere in the hemisphere, they were a minority of the population. They were subjected to crushing military force and a whole series of other quite discreet but discernible factors intervene. Now what I tried to do in this

book role Jordan Role is to deal with the question of how a people who are oppressed, who are not docile, who in fact in many ways showed the tremendous spirit of creative survival and resistance. Nevertheless had to in the end accommodate themselves to living within that system because they couldn't challenge it in a revolutionary way. That meant a lot of compromises but it also meant a lot of brilliant strategies. You did not pick that title by accident I am told. What is the relevance of using the title of the spiritual book to the whole of your 800 page book? Well a good part of that book is given over to the slaves religion because what I found after studying the subject for many years and I certainly didn't start with it as an assumption was that the ability of the slaves to survive as a people, I don't merely mean survive physically reproducing themselves

which would have been astonishing enough accomplishment when you consider the nature of the oppression. But to survive as a people to come out of slavery as I am convinced they did with a great deal of pride in being black people and with a real record of accomplishment to refer to. I am convinced that the key to that was their ability to fashion a religious experience of their own. And what I argue in the book is that it is a mistake to think that because the slaves became Christian took over the religion of the masters that they therefore simply absorbed the religion from above. That in fact what they did was to bring into it a sensibility of their own which incidentally I think has very strong African roots but also was a product of their own community life. And so they reshaped it into a distinct religious experience of a very special kind which I tried to you know if you are going

to make a statement like that you are going to have to say more than that. And I took a lot of pages to work through the slaves attitudes as they themselves expressed towards sin or the soul, what heaven, what hell, what the responsibilities of human beings to each other and to God and so on. And I tried to argue that while that religious experience had much in common with the religious experience of the whites around them it also had very crucial differences. And Roll Jordan Roll was the title of what was one of the most popular spirituals in the southeast. The fact that they did share that religion with the white masters would seem just on the surface to be very contradictory. How do you resolve the fact that even though there is an African influence that they had the same religion and yet they were the oppressed and the oppressors? Well this is not so strange. After all, medieval lords in let's say France or in Russia had highly antagonistic

and exploitive relations with the serfs. Yet they were both in one instance Catholic and the other instance Orthodox. And I think what you can also show by studying the popular as opposed to the high religions is that within that Catholicism, within that Orthodoxy in fact the religious experience of the people very considerably from that of their masters. The religion became in a sense a way of mediating the differences and of minimizing the level of violence between them. But it didn't destroy it, but it means. Since we're in France and Russia as well as the old south, how important is it to you to study other working class, other cultural kinds of adaptations of working class people? Is there a relationship between the serfs of Russia and the slaves of the old south? In a certain sense yes. For one thing, you'll have a problem if you look at the black culture

as it came out of slavery. This is absolutely astonishing the development of black music for example. The development of the black variant of English language. And I think it can be demonstrated. I tried to do it in a summary form in the book. How in fact black southern is particularly during that period, but even afterwards spoke a different dialect in some significant ways from say lower class one. Now the problem is how much of this is the result of a specifically black experience that extends from Africa through the plantation experience as slaves and so on. And how much of it is parallel to the experience of other oppressed lower classes. If you cannot make that kind of a comparative analysis, it's very hard to separate out what is a manifestation

of lower class culture and what is a manifestation of specifically black culture. So that you have to have a comparative perspective or you cannot be sure if you're grounded at all in dealing with those things. We really aren't done with the slave period, but I want to just briefly talk about what happens after emancipation and what does this black culture which you speak do for and to the people as they move into a new and different situation. You know, I stopped my book in 1865 for a reason. I'm not very sure of my ground on those questions. I don't think there's any question that the black community in the United States has had a very vital cultural life of its own, as well as contributing to the mainstream of American national life. And I think that's the critical thing here. The argument between a separatist and an integrationist position, I think Mrs. The Point that this was an experience that was both, that allowed black people to be part of the American mainstream

on the one side and yet, in certain crucial respects, to come out of slavery and Jim Crow as a people of part. Now that there are strong continuities in black culture to the present date, there's no question. However, that's a subject that requires very special attention and its relationship to subsequent politics, for example, including present-day politics, is a very tricky thing. It's easy to spew generalizations. I probably do it as much as other people, but it's something that I think really needs a great deal of careful study before we can be sure of our ground. Well, since you feel more comfortable talking about pre-1865, let's do that. What about some of the stereotypes that I think we all carry, whether from our school experience or the mainstream culture or whatever, of particular kinds of people within a slave culture, kinds of people in places where they live, things like the big house, things like the mami, the driver. I know you're particularly interested

in those two. Tell us about how you perceive that as different from how we have grown up to sort of put that in a box. Well, you know, I had not only grown up with the notion of the mami as, oh, white man's black woman who raised the white children, ignored her own black children, had contempt for the field slaves. In fact, the general notion has been that the house slaves as a whole had contempt for the field slaves. However, when I got into the sources and I started studying it carefully, I had to throw those generalizations out. What kind of sources are you talking about? Both black and white sources. On the white side, a sudden planted, for example, left an enormous manuscript literature. I'm not now so much concerned with what they said for public consumption. I really am more interested in what they wrote in private letters to each other, what they wrote in the diaries, to earn mark for publication. But also, other whites who came through as travelers and some of them, particularly some European women who passed

through the south were mockably acute. Not all the travelers were. Now, on the black side, we have several thousand interviews with ex slaves. We also have books written by slaves who escaped from slavery. And we have the evidence from black folklore in the music and in the oral tradition. The trick, if that's the word, was to put all of these things together and to see, to what extent they, in fact, confirm each other. And you might be surprised and how often the whites and blacks seem to be saying quite the same thing with different value judgments, different perceptions, but you can see the describing the same situation. Now what I found with the Mami was that I'm with the driver in a different way, with that these were people on the whole who tried very hard to protect the black people in their charge and to mediate between the master and the field hands. It was a highly ambiguous and relationship. In the case of the drivers who were more or less black foreman, they had

to do a lot of the whipping. Some of them were extremely cruel to the fellow blacks. But in general, I didn't find that was so. In general, I found that they did what they had to do to enforce the white man's discipline. They wouldn't have lasted long to hadn't. But at the same time, they did what they could to protect their people from excesses. It was an impossible position for them to be in. I'd rather impress with how well so many of them seem to have walked that tight well. They also incidentally emerged from slavery as probably among the most able plantation managers in the south. Many of those black drivers, in fact, ran the plantations and the white planters themselves testified to this. That these were extremely resourceful people who knew what they had to do in terms of getting to crop out and organizing production and taking care of all of the tales and keeping the people working and so on. Well, it belies all kinds of arguments about the slaves being stupid and lazy and that kind of thing does not. Some slaves were doubtedly stupid, but you know a great deal of what the white source

stupidity was a positive genius for being stupid when you didn't want to do something that somebody else was trying to make you do. And here, the record of the blacks in faking out their masters in pretending to not understand what they understood very well is quite clear. And incidentally, the brightest of the white planters knew very well that they were being conned. They commented on this all the time. They also knew, however, that when they ran into it, it was a signal to them that they were pressing too hard and they might just as well ease up because they weren't going to get anywhere. And sometimes they lay on the whip, but other times they compromise. And this was kind of a relationship it had to be. What about the image of the Uncle Tom? Does that not fit in there somewhere? Well, I think if by Uncle Tom, you mean the kind of a slave who did whatever he was told and loved it, who was a creature of the white man's

will. In any situation where you have a highly exploited, oppressed people, you'll find some of that. The slaves had some people who corresponded to that type, but it's a serious mistake to see that as the typical reaction. I think typically every slave had to have some Uncle Tom in him if he was going to survive, because he was too much exposed to violence he couldn't protect himself against. But that too can slide over into a defense mechanism for people who, in fact, have made a much strenuous stuff. And it was exactly trying to work out that tension that engrossed me for much of the book. Well, don't you maintain in your book something to the effect that someone who is an Uncle Tom and who performs as well as possible is the one who is the most likely to be disillusioned when he is not rewarded by that system and then becomes a much more violent rebel? Yes. That is, what fascinated me about daily violence was not those slaves who were simply uncontrollable. There were some. But how much of the violence came from slaves

who were not known as trouble makers, who were what the white man called a good Negro. You know, somebody who go a long day after day, year after year, not make any trouble. And one day, he'd be insulted. Or something apparently trivial would happen. And he kill us obviously. Now, I tried to work through some of the problems with that, but in general I think that the slaves had their own notion of how much they would take. And they defined it differently, of course, a person-to-person. But when that line was crossed, the white man was in danger. I just have a moment to ask you this question in, but what about black families within this oppressive society? Well, my own conclusions correspond to the conclusions of a number of other scholars who have been attacking this problem with somewhat different methods. The blacks for the most part lived in a pretty solidly stable, nuclear family units. Their families were broken up. They were subjected to terrible pressures on their family life. But the real

story, I think, is in a tenacious way they fought to live together as a solid family unit. The tremendous evidence of affection between husbands and wives in a remarkable way they raised their children. And this, I think, is the real story. Not that some of them became dispirited and broken under what were really quite unbearable circumstances, often. You spoke at the beginning about being a Marxist historian, and I'm interested in our last few minutes to explore that a little more. What does that mean? What does that mean when you go to the university on a Monday morning? What does that mean for the way you approach your work? Why is it important to say that you're a Marxist historian? Well, when I say I'm a Marxist historian, it means I have a certain point of view to what is essential in the process of historical change. What I think is essential, precisely class relationships. My book in a certain way is a working out of a specific set of class relationships. Now, the term, of course, also implies a commitment to socialist politics

because it has grown up not only as a term for an intellectual movement, but for political movement, and that's another story. Well, what is that story? Well, I am a socialist. I think there is a relationship between my socialist politics and my approach to history. Are those socialist politics that of a revolutionary? That word has been used by everybody from Richard Nixon to God knows who in the last- Let me put it this way, could your parents trust their kids with you? Are you going to be inciting to riot? Well, inciting to riot is not one of my things. Look, the question of whether this struggle for a socialist society in say country like the United States becomes a revolutionary one in the normal sense of that word of pitting people in violent confrontations. I don't think is a question of my preference

or anyone else's. I do think that if a political movement arises in this country, which is committed to socialism, that those people who control the economy and society are not likely to surrender power because the vote goes against them. And I think that from that point of view, any socialist who does not take into consideration the possibilities of such confrontations is deluding himself. That doesn't mean that one wills it or wouldn't try to avoid it. Let me break in just for a moment. I think when you say socialist, you maybe mean something different from the people who are perhaps at home thinking that socialist means communist means Stalinist. Is that the kind of socialist you're talking about? I haven't given you much time to respond to that. No, you certainly haven't. Look, I think briefly, I consider the Soviet Union and China socialist societies, but the fact that they're at each other's throats is enough to demonstrate that there are many kinds

of socialism. And the critical question here, I think, is not so much socialism, but the political system across with it. There's nothing in socialism per se, my opinion, that requires a Stalinist or any kind of totalitarian dictatorship. And in a country with the traditions of freedom and democracy that ours has, I would think this is not only can be avoided, but it should be avoided. And I don't believe an American socialism would go down and grow it. With that, I have to thank you for telling us what you think about the state of the politics and to telling us about slavery in particular. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for being with us.