Ambiguous Lives Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879

Alexander Adele Logan

ISBN 10: 1557282153 / ISBN 13: 9781557282156

Published by The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, 1991

About this Item

This item is heavy and may attract postal surcharges. Covers have been laminated.

Seller Inventory # PF4009

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Ambiguous Lives Free Women of Color in Rural Georgia, 1789-1879
• Publisher: The University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville
• Publication Date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1557282153
• ISBN 13: 9781557282156
• Binding: Soft Cover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

1992 Myers Center Outstanding Book on Human Rights

Historians have produced scores of studies on white men, extraordinary white women, and even the often anonymous mass of enslaved Black people in the United States. But in this innovative work, Adele Logan Alexander chronicles there heretofore undocumented dilemmas of one of nineteenth-century America’s most marginalized groups—free women of color in the rural South.

Ambiguous Lives focuses on the women of Alexander’s own family as representative of this subcaste of the African-American community. Their forbears, in fact, included Africans, Native Americans, and whites. Neither black nor white, affluent nor impoverished, enslaved nor truly free, these women of color lived and died in a shadowy realm situated somewhere between the legal, social, and economic extremes of empowered whites and subjugated blacks. Yet, as Alexander persuasively argues, these lives are worthy of attention precisely because of these ambiguities—because the intricacies, gradations, and subtleties of their anomalous experience became part of the tangled skein of American history and exemplify our country’s endless diversity, complexity, and self-contradictions.

Written as a “reclamation” of a long-ignored substratum of our society, Ambiguous Lives is more than the story of one family—it is a well-researched and fascinating profile of America, its race and gender relations, and its complex cultural weave.

 

From the Back Cover

Written as a "reclamation" of a long-ignored substratum of our society, Ambiguous Lives is more than the story of one family?it is a well-researched and fascinating profile of America, its race and gender relations, and its complex cultural weave.