What is the temporality of slave childhood? Depending on whom you ask, the answers are quite different: enslaved people in the United States were never children, or always children (at least under the law). Historians and theoreticians of childhood have located the cementing of the concept of "the child" in the early-to-mid 19th century and the spread of white bourgeois culture in the United States. But these were the very years in which domestic slavery became most deeply entrenched in the American economy, and the population of enslaved people rose to its height of over three million. In this article I explore the non-sequential temporality of childhood under slavery that forces us to rethink the founding narratives of childhood itself. Using the model of "queer time" formulated by Elizabeth Freeman, Dana Luciano, and others, I imagine the "slave time" of childhood, which stops and starts, projects and defers, and ultimately both rejects and lays claim to dominant tropes of childhood development.
While dominant ideas of white childhood in the 19th century US were organized around a narrative of movement from innocence to experience, uselessness to utility, and, at the same time, the sacredness of childhood as a period outside the logic of capitalism, slave childhood only partially and episodically occupied those topoi. In a survey of over a dozen narratives by formerly enslaved people, I found that childhood was barely mentioned, since it existed imaginarily outside of the workings of slavery. Indeed, many narratives either skipped over childhood altogether, or represented it as a brief sojourn in a world outside of the market concerns of the slave economy, usually ending between the ages of five and seven.
The few narratives that do address slave childhood take two different approaches. One set focuses on the moment in which the child can no longer sustain the dual identifications as "slave" and "child" (Frederick Douglass is a prime example here). The other, more interestingly to me, removes the suffering of narrator from the body of the child to the affective experience of a mother or grandmother (John Thompson, Elizabeth Keckley, and Moses Grandy are instances of this approach). I argue that these narrators recognize the impossibility of claiming the time of childhood for themselves and instead appropriate "childhood" by reformulating for enslaved people the definition of the child as that person cared for by a mother or mother-figure.If childhood is the site of disciplinary intimacy, of maternal devotion (defined, in Luciano's words, by "doubled temporality, at once timeless and of necessity transient" [122]), the these writers' focus on the suffering of mothers and mother surrogates claims childhood outside of standard temporal frames.
This piece is still in process: I am putting together an initial draft as of this writing. I do hope, though, that my arguments here will help us rethink how slavery and the experiences of enslaved people problematize the temporality of childhood across the board, both seizing the prerogatives of childhood (and, hence, of adulthood as enslaved men- and women-to-be) and challenging the narratives of innocence around white childhood that Robin Bernstein has already questioned. I'm not sure where I will end up, but I know that participation in this seminar will help me firm up my ideas, fill in gaps in knowledge and theoretical grounding, and deepen my understanding of the logic of childhood in relation to the system of slavery.
