A Terrible, Terrible Intimacy: Melvin Patrick Ely on Interracial Life in the Slaveholding South

“The burdens of slavery did crush some people. They elicited outright armed rebellion from others. And between those two extremes, there’s all manner of response. But black culture was what most historians say it was: rich, semiautonomous — and yet there is all kinds of cross-fertilization that goes on.” — Melvin Patrick Ely

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the republic, America is still struggling to come to terms with its original sin — slavery. With his new micro-history, A Terrible Intimacy, Melvin Patrick Ely takes all the abstractions, moral and otherwise, out of the story. The meticulous Ely has spent many years in the county records of Prince Edward County, Virginia, going through 75 cartons of nineteenth-century papers: court cases, lawsuits, plantation ledgers, testimony from black and white witnesses alike. The result is a history of six criminal trials which reveals the intimacy of life between whites and blacks in the slaveholding South.

In Prince Edward County, as on most small Southern farms — and contrary to our plantation mythology, fully half the enslaved people in the South lived on small properties of fewer than twenty people — black and white people knew each other personally. They drank together, worshipped together, spoke the same dialect, shared the same folk knowledge of weather, nature, and time. Ely tells the story of an enslaved man named Tom and his white overseer Richard Foster who consumed a quart of whiskey together in the morning, and then fought to the death that same afternoon over a surcingle strap. That was how blacks and whites lived and died. Such intimacy, Ely is careful to make clear, did not mitigate anything. Everyone knew the master who gouged a slave’s eyes with sticks and pulled sound teeth out with pliers. But he was the outlier. Life was mostly more tragically complex. That was the terribly terrible intimacy about America’s original sin.

Five Takeaways

•       Thirty Years in the County Records: Five or six entire summers, six days a week, eight hours a day, in the Library of Virginia — plus months of collating, plus years of writing. Seventy-five cartons of papers from Prince Edward County: court cases with witness testimony, plantation records, mercantile ledgers, letters, building contracts (including the bill from the carpenter who built the gallows on which one of the book’s central figures was hanged). Ely’s method: go through tens of thousands of documents looking for needles in a haystack — nuggets of revelatory information about how the society actually operated. Most historians process that research behind the scenes and deliver a smooth narrative. Ely does it in front of you, in conversation with the reader.

•       Tom and the Overseer: A Quart of Whiskey and a Fight to the Death: The book’s first chapter is built around one criminal trial. An enslaved man named Tom is on trial for killing his white overseer, Richard Foster, with the handle of a hoe. The testimony — from white witnesses including the dead man’s own sister, and from other enslaved people on the farm — reveals that in the morning of the day of the killing, the two men had sat down and drunk together as much as a quart of whiskey. Then, later in the day, a stupid verbal exchange about a missing strap escalates into a fight to the death. In a single day: drinking like buddies, then killing. That is the terrible intimacy — closeness and callousness, not as opposites, but as the same thing.

•       Half the Enslaved Lived on Small Farms: The plantation is the dominant image of American slavery — the sprawling estate, the hund